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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE ADVENTURE 
OF DEATH 



BY 



ROBERT W. MACKENNA 

M.A., M.D. 



To die will be an awfully big adventure" 

James M. Barrie {Peter and Wendy) 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Ube Umfcfeerbocfter press 

1917 



** 



1^v 



Copyright, 191 7 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



■ St 



I -9 1917 



Ube fmfcfcerbocfter press, "Revo Borfc 



GIA462922 
"We 



Co 

MY 
FATHER and MOTHER 



FOREWORD 

The kindness and modesty of the author 
of this little volume have led him to ask me 
to write a preface for it, and I assent with 
much hesitation and diffidence. 

There is probably no sensation which 
makes such universal and insistent appeal 
to intelligent beings as the anticipation of 
death. This anticipation manifests itself 
in a thousand different ways: between the 
ever-present and solemn dread of Dr. 
Johnson or Charles Wesley, or the calm 
and undaunted courage of James Wolfe or 
Captain Oates and the flippant cynicism of 
Vespasian or of Charles II, there are in- 
numerable gradations of sensibility, but no 
one can altogether dismiss the idea. 

The appeal then is universal, but perhaps 
at no time has it been more insistent than 
now, when millions of men and women of all 
nationalities are called upon to face death 
daily, and when not only they but all their 



vi fforeworfc 



kith and kin are sharing this anticipation 
on their behalf. 

Few things can give us a more clear sense 
of the narrow limitations of our own powers 
than the consciousness of our inability to 
obtain even a glimpse of what lies im- 
mediately behind the veil, but it behoves 
everyone to form some clear conception of 
what lies on this side of it. 

In this endeavour Dr. MacKenna's book 
will be found to render invaluable assist- 
ance. He has enjoyed exceptional opportun- 
ities, as a physician, of studying the state 
of mind and demeanour of those who are 
at the point of death, and of gathering and 
collating the experiences of soldiers who 
have faced the perils of war. 

Those who are inclined to shun the con- 
templation of death from a vague sense of 
terror, may take heart from these pages, 
which certainly go far to proving that death 
itself is rarely a painful thing, although 
pain from other causes may attend it. 



fforeworfc vii 



"The fear of death," says Bacon, "as a 
tribute due to nature, is weak." 

It is to be hoped that this little volume 
may, at the present time, give rise to dis- 
cussion and to the collection of fresh evidence 
as to the sensations and experiences caused 
by the imminence of danger. 

Dr. MacKenna's illustration of a large 
railway system (p. 44) is a most illuminating 
one, but there are other aspects of the sub- 
ject which deserve investigation ; for example, 
Does fear lie chiefly in the anticipation of 
pain rather than in facing an actually present 
peril? In the case of a soldier in battle, is 
not the fear of pain and death in some cases 
overmastered by the greater fear of disgrace 
or dereliction of duty? 

Few men can have reached middle age 
without having had to face the prospect of 
death, either from some great and sudden 
peril or through the more deliberate process 
of, e. g., a serious surgical operation. 

If I may presume to draw upon my own 



viii foreword 



experience I would say that in face of sudden 
peril I have had no consciousness of fear, 
but for some time after it had passed, I was 
subject to a recurrent sense of shuddering 
at the narrowness of the escape, and what 
might have been the consequence. Is this 
a form of retrospective fear? In the case 
of an operation of which no one could fore- 
tell the result fear is undoubtedly present 
during the days of preparation, but when 
the patient is actually on the operating 
table this seems to pass away and to give 
place to a sensation of the inevitable, not 
unmixed with curiosity. 

Be this as it may, I venture to hope that 
this volume will do much to clear up preva- 
lent beliefs as to the Adventure of Death, 
and the reverent and confident spirit in 
which Dr. MacKenna treats the subject 
can hardly fail to bring comfort and re- 
assurance to the faint-hearted. 

John Murray. 

April, 1 916. 



PREFACE 

The subject dealt with in the following 
pages is one of interest to the whole human 
race, for some day each one of us must lay- 
aside the avocations, big or little, that have 
occupied us, and pass through the portal that 
separates this life from the Unknown. It is 
part of the purpose of this book to show that 
the passage is not a painful experience, and 
that, as a rule, the most timid traveller di- 
vests himself of all fear when the shadow of the 
gateway looms over him. 

These conclusions I have come to in the 
course of my work as a physician, and they 
are supported by almost all the members of my 
profession with whom I have discussed them, 
as well as by the large body of evidence avail- 
able in literature and history. Your own 
great-hearted poet, Walt Whitman, who 



preface 



learned many lessons in his hospital work dur- 
ing the Civil War, has put this on record : — 

"As to Death, it is in reality a very differ- 
ent affair from the romantic stage view of it. 
Death-bed speeches and scenes are of the 
rarest occurrence. I have witnessed hund- 
reds of deaths, and, as a rule, it seems just a 
matter of course, — like having your break- 
fast, or any other event of the day, and met 
with indifference at the last, and with apathy 
or unconsciousness." 

At the present time we in Europe are living 
in a welter of blood, and the Angel of Death is 
hovering over almost every household. Our 
young men go forth gladly, with a smile on 
their lips and high courage in their hearts, 
and very few have shunned the path of duty 
through any craven dread. They have dis- 
covered that to face Death is to learn to 
cease to fear him, and on the shell-torn battle- 
field many of them have readjusted their 
views of Life, of Death, and of the Beyond. 

In the far-off days that preceded the war 



preface xi 



few of us gave much thought to the ultimate 
ending of our lives, for, to every healthy- 
man his own Death seems a remote contin- 
gency. But now our young men keep daily 
company with Death; he is always at their 
elbow, and they have found that his presence 
does not appal them. If we look at life 
aright we should recognize that their experi- 
ence is our own, for even in the peaceful 
pursuits of the most sheltered life Death 
is never far off, and may at any moment 
lay a kindly hand upon the shoulder. I 
have sought to dissipate those dark and 
erroneous views that have gathered, like 
some chilling miasma, round the subject, and 
I am hopeful that what I have written may 
afford consolation and encouragement to the 
faint-hearted. 

In the concluding chapters of the book I 
try to prove in the light of modern scientific 
knowledge that Death does not extinguish the 
life of the individual, but that we go on. 
This is a fundamental tenet of most religious 



Xll 



preface 



systems, but, without appeal to revealed 
religion, I consider that we have reasonable 
grounds for believing that Death does not 
annihilate us, but that beyond the confines 
of this life we enter upon new and loftier 
experiences. 

Robert W. MacKenna. 



Liverpool, England, 
November, igi6. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Proem 3 

CHAPTER II 
The Great Adventure ... 9 

CHAPTER III 

The Fear of Death .... 27 

CHAPTER IV 
The Fear of Death (Continued) . . 65 

CHAPTER V 
The Painlessness of Death . . 97 

CHAPTER VI 

Euthanasia 117 

CHAPTER VII 
What Life Gains from Death . .129 

xiii 



xiv Contents 



CHAPTER VIII 



PAGE 



Does Death End All? (i) Is Man 
More than Matter? . . .141 

CHAPTER IX 

Does Death End All? (2) The Sur- 
vival of Personality . . .157 

CHAPTERX 

Epilogue . ,«,- 

. i»7 

lNDEX • • . . . . 191 



CHAPTER I 
PROEM 



"Tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est." 

Seneca. 

"Every day travels towards death, thy last only arrives 

at it." 

Montaigne. 

"Life is but to do a day's work honestly, and death, 
to come home for a day's wages when the sun goes down. " 

Whyte-Melville. 



CHAPTER I 

PROEM 

When, with his first cry, the new-born 
infant challenges the world, and sets out on 
his pilgrimage through life, he carries with 
him sealed orders. But whatever road he 
may have to travel, and be his journey long 
or short, there is one gate through which he 
must pass and one caravanserai in which, at 
last, he must take his rest: 

"Nascentesmorimur, finisque aborigine pendet." 

No high-road to London is so thronged 
as that on which the new-born child sets 
his foot : for the whole human race is march- 
ing along it, and all the heroes of the romantic 
past, and the great men of ages yet unborn 

have travelled, or are still to travel, along 
3 



IProem 



that beaten highway. And there is no halt- 
ing on the road. Day after day, night after 
night the crowd moves on. Men turn aside 
for a moment, for the business of life calls 
them, and there are treasures to be gathered 
by the way; or the shaded pleasaunces allure 
them for a little while; but ever the feet are 
turned to the same goal. The market-place, 
and the land of the lotos-eater are only round- 
about paths through which the wayfarer 
may wander on his way to the inn at the 
journey's end. For we cannot build for 
ourselves any permanent abiding-place by 
the roadside. 

Some of the travellers make better speed 
than others, and may reach the end of the 
journey within a moment or an hour of 
their setting out upon it. Others come to the 
end only when their hair is silvered and their 
eyes are dimmed; but for each the journey 
lasts a lifetime. 

On, and on, and on, up the long, steep 
hill, and along the wearisome straight and 



ttbe 1Roa& ot Xife 



down the slope into the valley, and onward 
and upward again go the myriad tramping 
feet — feet whose steps are as noiseless as 
those of ghosts, though they are the feet 
of living men. Thunder and rain, snow 
and the biting wind cannot hinder the 
progress of this great army, which moves 
relentless ever towards its goal; for the road 
of life is the road to death, and the caravan- 
serai is the grave. 

"Does the road wind uphill all the way?" 

"Yes, to the very end." 
"Will the day's journey take the whole long day ?" 

"From morn to night, my friend. " 

"But is there for the night a resting-place?" 
" A roof for when the slow dark hours begin." 

" May not the darkness hide it from my face ? " 
"You cannot miss that inn." 

"Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?" 

"Those who have gone before." 
" Then must I knock, or call when just in sight ? " 

"They will not keep you standing at that 
door." 



proem 



"Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?" 
"Of labour you shall find the sum." 

"Will there be beds for me and all who seek?" 
"Yea, beds for all who come." 



CHAPTER II 
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 



"O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could 
advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou 
hast done; and whom all the world hath nattered, thou 
only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast 
drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, 
cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with 
these two narrow words, 

Hie Jacetl " 

Sir Walter Raleigh. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

It is singular that though death has 
been a fact in human existence from the 
beginning of time, man's view of it has 
undergone very little change. That is be- 
cause relatively little study or consideration 
has been devoted to it. The poets, the philo- 
sophers, and the great essayists like Mon- 
taigne and Bacon have toyed with the fringe 
of its garments, and have uttered high- 
sounding and imperishable words on the 
subtle mystery. But they are in a minority, 
and there are many men who do no more than 
fling an occasional thought to death with the 
same indifference as they would throw a bone 
to a dog. Very few, in any generation, have 

devoted to the fact of death the amount of 
9 



io Ube Great Btwenture 

reflection they dedicate to the every-day 
problems of life. For death is, they flatter 
themselves, a thing remote, while the present 
moment of life is urgent with duties. And 
in this age of motor-cars, and aviation, and 
quick transit by land and sea there is a danger 
of our losing, through lack of use, the faculty 
for reflection. We have no time to steal 
into some little nook of calm on the wayside 
of life for a quiet hour of thought. We are 
too busy throwing our moments away with 
prodigal hands to recognize that every one 
of them is a pearl of great price. 

We have moved on since the days of our 
grandfathers, and on few topics to-day are 
our thoughts what theirs were. 

Science has found the key to many mys- 
teries ; it has unlocked the secret of the colours 
of the rainbow; it has analysed the atmos- 
phere of the sun, and weighed the world as 
in a balance; but it has not succeeded in 
putting death into its crucibles or test-tubes 
and explaining it; and to-day men stand as 



ITmmortaUts of tbe protozoa n 

awe-stricken and puzzled in the presence of 
that great mystery as did our ancestors a 
thousand years ago. 

To comprehend anything thoroughly we 
must be able to look at it from all sides. At 
present we can only regard death from the 
side, and in the light, of life. 

Physical death is one of the penalties we 
pay for our individuality. When we pass low 
enough down in the scale of life we come 
upon a huge class of unicellular organisms, 
such as infusoria and many protozoa, which 
multiply by dividing into two, the parent 
organism being represented by two offspring, 
and so on through countless generations. 
The latest descendant has within its body 
some part of the original parent cell, and that 
fractional part is in some sense immortal. 
As Weismann says, "The individual life is 
short, but it ends not in death, but in trans- 
formation to two new individuals. " But this 
is a poor starveling variety of immortality, 
and there are few men but would rather have 



12 Zbc Great Btwenture 

their "crowded hour of glorious life" than 
enjoy the shadowy physical immortality of 
a protozoon. 

Personally I should even prefer to have 
my allotted span of human life with all 
its capacities for joy and sorrow, and the 
caravanserai of the grave awaiting me at 
the end of the journey, than be called upon 
to endure the long-drawn-out vegetative ex- 
istence of Adanson's Baobab tree at Cape 
Verde, which, he calculated, had braved the 
tempests of five thousand years. 

None of us can escape death, for every 
avenue of life leads down to it, nor can we 
materially postpone the hour when we must 
arrive there. Applied sanitary science has 
done much in the last twenty years to lessen 
the death-rate throughout the country, and 
especially in our large cities. Fifty years ago 
the death-rate in London was twenty-four 
per thousand: to-day it has been reduced to 
fourteen; but all the prevention of preventi- 
ve disease, the improvements in the water 



Bx>era0e duration of Xffe 13 

and milk supplies — which, if neglected, may 
become impetuous ministers of death — the 
better sanitation, and more modern methods 
of treating disease, have not succeeded in 
prolonging the average length of the individ- 
ual life by more than two or three years. 
Civilization tends to take back with one hand 
what it gives with the other, and the high 
pressure at which life is lived to-day robs it 
of many of the advantages afforded by pro- 
tection against the attack from without of the 
myrmidon germs of disease. And the small 
admitted gain in the length of human life is 
more apparent than real, for the average 
increase is, in large measure, made up from a 
diminution of infantile mortality in the first 
few years of life and by the prolongation of 
the lives of those who are born delicate. 

In all ages there have been men who have 
lived far beyond the average duration of 
human life. St. Mungo, the patron saint 
of Glasgow, is reputed to have attained the 
ripe age of 185, and Thomas Parr was more 



14 ttbe Great HSventure 

than 150 years old when he died; and here 
and there one may meet or hear of a sporadic 
centenarian. But, in spite of exceptions, and 
in spite of all that science can do to ward off 
the advent of death, the words of Moses' 
sublime psalm still ring true: "The days of 
our years are three-score years and ten; and 
if by reason of strength they be fourscore 
years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow 
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." The 
conclusion of the poet-prophet has been proved 
through all the intervening ages to be wonder- 
fully true, despite the fact that it must have 
been formulated without reference to any 
carefully collated vital statistics. 

In most cases a man's useful life ends with 
his seventieth year. After that he begins 
to view things in a wrong perspective. He 
has lost the zest of life; his enthusiasms have 
been whittled away by the edge of the years ; 
he becomes a Jeremiah crying "Woe, woe," 
and prophesying strange dangers ; or he drifts 
into senility and becomes an undiscerning 



Seefefna an Elftfr of Xife 15 

laudator temporis acti. "And the strong men 
shall bow themselves . . . and they shall 
be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall 
be in the way . . . because man goeth to 
his lon£ home." 

From the beginning of time sorcerers and 
alchemists have sought to find an elixir of 
life which should keep man forever young, 
and be a prophylactic against death. The 
seekers are still with us, and are now repre- 
sented by one of the foremost scientists of the 
day, Professor Elie Metchnikoff , of the Pas- 
teur Institute, Paris. He has devoted much 
patient attention to the problem of the pro- 
longation of life, and fancies that he has found 
a partial solution of it in the bacillus Bulgar- 
icus — a potent strain of milk-souring bacillus 
— and the Glycobacter, from the intestine 
of the dog. But which of us, by drinking 
buttermilk, can add one span to the length 
of his days? and every year that passes 
sees a few more silver threads in the great 
scientist's hair, and he, too, like all things 



16 Zbe ©reat HMocnture 



living, must some day pay the debt to 
Nature. 1 

"In the midst of life we are in death." 
It has been estimated that, in this world 
of ours, fifty-seven human beings die every 
minute of the day; and in addition there is 
an immense and incalculable mortality among 
all living creatures, insects, birds, and animals 
of every kind, besides plants and flowers. 
So that, though the fact rarely impinges upon 
our consciousness, we are every moment of 
our lives living in the valley of the shadow of 
death. And yet we find the world a very 
pleasant place to live in. 

When Claude Bernard said "La vie c'est 
la mort" he enunciated a great physiological 
truth, for every act of life is, in essence, an 
act of death. Every burning word that 
leaps from a poet's brain on to the virgin 
page, has come from some cell that in the 
throes of birth has given up some part of its 
vital force. Every gesture with which an 

* Prof. Metchnikoff died on July 15, 1916, aged 71. 



/IDoIecular 2)eatb 17 

orator sways a multitude, is accompanied 
by the death of some cell or other in his 
body. Even the movement of my pen 
across the paper as I write means that cells 
are being broken down and destroyed in my 
hand and arm, and part of me is dying that, 
perchance, some other traveller on the road 
to death may find comfort on the way. 

These processes of molecular death are 
taking place every moment in every one of 
us, and we are completely unconscious of 
them. 

Each of us carries within him, from the 
moment of his birth, the subtle and malign 
mechanism that, if he escape disease or 
accident, will bring about his death. It is 
an elementary fact of bacteriology that 
many, if not all, micro-organisms produce 
as a by-product of their growth substances 
which are capable of destroying them. The 
classical example is the Saccharomyces or 
yeast-fungus, which, at a suitable tempera- 
ture, grows luxuriantly in a solution of sugar. 



1 8 Zbc 6reat Bfcventure 

But as it grows it converts trie sugar into al- 
cohol, and when the alcohol has reached a 
certain degree of concentration it kills the 
yeast-fungus. In no medium are the life and 
growth of the yeast-fungus more exuberant 
than in a solution of sugar: and in no other 
medium does it so rapidly compass its own 
death. 

So it is with man. If he escape death 
from accident or from one of the diseases 
which all through life beset him like a pack 
of ravening wolves upon his flank, he dies 
ultimately of old age. And death from old 
age means, simply, the gradual poisoning of 
every cell in the body by long-continued 
exposure to the toxic substances that are 
produced within us by every act of life. In 
youth, and in the prime of manhood, these 
poisons are efficiently eliminated, and the 
body cells have a remarkable capacity for 
repair. But as the years pass on elimination 
becomes less and less effective, for the organs 
chiefly concerned with that function begin to 



2>eatb from ©16 Bae 19 

succumb to the influence of the poisons they 
are called upon to discharge, and the reten- 
tion of these toxic substances produces degen- 
erative changes in every organ of the body, 
till the organs can no longer perform their 
functions properly, and the process culmin- 
ates in death. 

It is this poisoning of the system with 
the by-products of our physical life which 
causes fatigue after any great effort of mind 
or body. A sense of fatigue is nothing 
more than the subjective expression of auto- 
intoxication; and the disappearance of the 
sensation of fatigue after a Turkish bath, 
or a good sleep, indicates that satisfactory 
elimination of the poisonous by-products has 
been accomplished, and sleep has afforded 
the silent body-builders an opportunity to 
execute repairs. 

Sleep itself is held fry some physiologists 
to be the outcome of a toxasmia or poison- 
ing, and the interesting fact that so many 
very old people sleep away the last few days 



20 TTbe Great Bfcwenture 

of their lives indicates that in the manner of 
their death they are not far removed from 
the unicellular yeast-fungus. 

Science has not yet succeeded in formu- 
lating an adequate definition of death. To 
define death simply as the cessation of 
vitality, is to define by negation, which is 
the refuge of the intellectually destitute. 
It has been defined as the loss of the capacity 
to respond to stimulation, but a curarized 
motor nerve or a sensory nerve "blocked" 
by cocaine is not dead, though its response 
to stimulation is temporarily in abeyance. 
When the influence of these drugs is removed 
the power of response is recovered. Still, 
as a working hypothesis, we may accept the 
definition, if we make the loss of capacity 
to respond permanent, though this definition 
will not satisfy those, who, like myself, be- 
lieve that man is something more than 
matter. But, after all, the definition of 
death is of little account. The chief thing 
is that it is inevitable — part of that human 



Zbc Xonelfness of Beatb 21 



destiny which we share with all our fellow- 
creatures. 

" Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla, 
Mors seterna tamen, nihilominus ilia manebit. " 

We live our life among others. Indeed, 
our life consists of a series of events and cir- 
cumstances in which others play a part. It 
is the merging into the lives of others, and 
the points of contact we make with them, 
that fashion or destroy much of our happi- 
ness here. We are gregarious: we live in a 
crowd, but we die alone. And out of this 
seeming loneliness of death man has evolved 
one of his objections to dying. It is here 
that the consolations of a robust religious 
faith nerve a man for the hazard. 

Robertson of Brighton once said, "No 
man ever lived whose acts were not smaller 
than himself, " and I have sometimes thought 
of these words when I have looked upon the 
face of the dead. There is a sublime dignity 
about death, and there are few faces that 



22 Ufoe Great Bfcwenture 



are not ennobled by its touch. For its 
marble hand smooths out the lineaments, 
and shows us the man as he really was. The 
furrows cut by the graving tool of care, 
the lines etched on the face by the acid of 
selfishness, and the wrinkles ploughed by 
the share of Time, are all obliterated or 
softened, and a quiet, impressive dignity 
settles on the face of the dead. 

When Alexander Smith, the author of 
City Poems, said, "If you wish to make a 
man look noble, your best course is to kill 
him," he was guilty of a crude hyperbole; 
but, obviously, he had looked upon a dead 
face and seen, as others too have seen, the 
majesty and benignity of death. Max Miil- 
ler had seen it when he wrote, "Never shall 
I forget the moment when for the last time 
I gazed upon the manly features of Charles 
Kingsley, features which death had rendered 
calm, grand, sublime. . . . There re- 
mained only the satisfied expression of tri- 
umph and peace, as of a soldier who had 



Beatb's Sculpture 23 

fought a good fight and who, while sinking 
into the stillness of the slumber of death, 
listens to the distant sounds of music and 
to the shouts of victory. One saw the ideal 
man, as Nature had meant him to be, and 
one felt that there is no greater sculptor than 
Death." 



CHAPTER III 
THE FEAR OF DEATH 



25 



"Optanda mors est, sine metu mortis mori. " 

Seneca. 

"Cowards die many times before their death, 
The valiant never taste of death but once. " 

Shakespeare. 

"He who has learned to die, has forgot what it is to be 
a slave." 

Montaigne. 

"The most rational cure, after all, for the inordinate 
fear of death is to set a just value on life. " 

William Hazlitt. 



26 



CHAPTER III 

THE FEAR OF DEATH 

It is a remarkable fact, which Metchni- 
koff describes as one of the disharmonies of 
life, that, as we rise in the animal world, the 
aversion to and fear of death increases. 
Low down in the scale there are animals 
which can witness the death of their fellows 
without the slightest evidence of compre- 
hending that a like fate awaits them some 
day. But, higher up, among the mammals 
there are others which manifest acute fear 
when confronted with the dead bodies of 
their own kind. Most horses, for example, 
are obviously distressed and frightened when 
brought face to face with a dead member of 
their own species. But we may well doubt 

whether any animal, however highly devel- 

27 



28 Ubc ffear of Deatb 



oped, is possessed of the knowledge that death 
is inevitable. That knowledge is one of the 
penalties which man must pay for his higher 
development. 

Rousseau, with brutal frankness, said, 
"He who pretends to face death without 
fear is a liar." But he was a philosopher 
of unhealthy mind and morbid habits, and 
should not be accepted as an infallible 
authority upon the matter. Tolstoy, in his 
later years, came nearer to the truth when he 
said, "No one is afraid of falling asleep, and 
yet the phenomena of sleep are like those of 
death — there is the same loss of consciousness. 
Man does not fear sleep, although the arrest 
of consciousness is as complete as in death. " 
The comparison is a fair one, but there is a 
tiny flaw running through it, for we know 
from the experience of ourselves and others 
that sleep is but a temporary condition, and 
that when it is over we return again to the 
full consciousness of life. Still, as Donne 
wrote, we 



JFear of Beatb a protection 29 

"Practise dying by a little sleep," 

and every time we fall asleep we perform a 
sublime experiment of faith. Sleep is, in 
the quaint words of Sir Thomas Browne: 
"In fine, so like death, I dare not trust it 
without my prayers, and an half adieu unto 
the World, and take my farewell in a colloquy 
with God." 

I do not believe that the fear of death is 
a natural instinct. It is not something 
inborn in us like hunger or thirst, else all 
little children would possess it. I believe, 
rather, that it is a mental attribute which 
has been developed, in process of evolution, 
for the protection of the species. It is 
one of those acquisitions that have pro- 
moted the survival of the fittest, and it is 
a factor of incalculable value in the whole 
order of things. Without the fear of death 
the gateway to suicide would be thrown 
open, and the coward heart would seek 
escape from every difficulty of life by de- 



30 Zhc jfear of Deatb 

stroying it. It is said that Hegesias painted 
the miseries of life in such dark colours 
that many of his pupils chose death as the 
less sombre alternative. But, for most of 
us, life has so much to offer that we are 
never tempted to throw it away, and the 
salutary fear of the Unknown which lies 
beyond the gate of death makes us wonder- 
fully tolerant of "the slings and arrows of 
outrageous fortune. " 

Shakespeare, with his splendid sanity, 
has stated the problem for all time: 

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of 
time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con- 
tumely, 
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin ? Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death 



H personal Reminiscence 31 

. puzzles the will, 
And makes us rather bear those ills we have, 
Than fly to others that we know not of?" 

Finot has said that "man himself created 
the fear of death," but whether or not this 
be true we cannot escape from the conclusion 
that man has heightened and increased the 
fear by the pageantry of funereal gloom with 
which he has surrounded death. There 
comes back to me the memory of an incident 
in my childhood which, analysed in the light 
of later experience, indicates from what 
sources we derive our gloomy, fearful views 
of death. In an old white house, separated 
by a field from the home of my childhood, 
lived a venerable old gentleman. I remem- 
ber him well, after the long lapse of years. 
He was, I think, fond of children, and when- 
ever he met me on the road he had a cheery 
greeting and, on occasion, would conjure up 
a sweet from some mysterious recess of his 
coat-pocket. He died suddenly. I do not 
think his death caused me the least sorrow. 



32 Zbc fear of Deatb 

I had a childish faith that all good people 
go to heaven, and a kind old gentleman who 
carried sweets in his pocket would certainly 
not be denied entrance to that happy land. 
I imagined him, as I had last seen him, with 
his large white hat, walking about the streets 
in heaven giving sweets to small angels e 
He was dead; but he had gone to heaven, so 
what was the need of tears. 

Four days after his death I was playing 
in the field which separated his house from 
ours, on a slope beside a hawthorn tree which 
still stands, when the sound of the muffled 
padding of lightly shod hoofs drew my at- 
tention from my play. Up the long avenue 
to the house there was coming a terrible 
apparition — a long, black coach, the top of 
which was surmounted by great black nod- 
ding plumes, drawn by two black horses with 
sweeping tails, and driven by a solemn-faced 
man from whose black hat a long streamer of 
cr£pe fluttered in the wind. It was an old- 
fashioned funeral hearse. I had never seen 



jfunereal <3loom 33 

one before, but the sight of it in some inexplic- 
able way froze my heart, and it was as though 
a black cloud had passed across the face of the 
sun. It was my first vision of the gloom of 
death, and I felt a strange desire to cry. I 
could no longer think of my old friend as 
happy in heaven. In some way this dreadful 
thing I had seen was associated with him, and 
death had ceased to be a safe transition from 
earth to heaven and had become a thing black, 
mysterious, and awesome. 

And so deeply do some of the memories 
of pain cut their impress upon the plastic 
heart of a child, that I never revisit that field 
and pass beneath the branches of the haw- 
thorn tree without recalling and revisualizing 
the whole scene. I can still hear the muffled 
beating of hoofs, and see the black and nod- 
ding plumes. 

We have abolished some of the funereal 
gloom from the chamber of death since the 
days of Bacon. We no longer hang the 
walls and drape the death-bed with black, 



34 ^be ffear ot H>eatb 

and we make a larger use of the gentle minis- 
try of flowers, but we may still say with him : 

" Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa.'* 

It must be admitted that the fear of death 
is very widely disseminated among men; but 
it is not a deep-rooted instinct, or it would not 
be so readily overcome. It is the least of 
fears. It gives way before many sudden 
emotions or impulses such as love, the excite- 
ment of battle, the call of duty, religious 
devotion, and the maternal instinct. When a 
sudden and imperious call comes to men or 
women to risk their lives for some tender 
object of their affection, the fear of death is 
thrown roughly to the wall. 

After the South African War I had many 
opportunities of talking the matter over 
with some of the men who fought through 
it, and I obtained ample confirmation of the 
opinion which I had already formed from 
my reading, that, in the heat of battle, the 
fear of death is absolutely obliterated. These 



An JSattle 35 



men told me that the most testing time was 
the five minutes before the action began. 
Then there was tense anxiety, and a curious 
sense of uncertainty, sometimes accompanied 
by a feeling of thirst ; but once the heavy guns 
had commenced to roar their challenge, and 
hurl their death-pealing shells, all fear of 
death was forgotten, swallowed up in the 
excitement of battle. Even the wounding or 
death of a comrade close by, did not suffice 
to reawaken the dread of death, and some 
who were wounded have told me that at the 
moment of their injury they were unaware 
that they had been hurt, and did not realize 
that they were stricken men till they were 
overcome by weakness. But after the fight 
was over, and the din of battle had ebbed into 
a great and vague silence, as they Jay on the 
veldt and longed for the arrival of the ambu- 
lance-men, worn out by loss of blood and tor- 
tured by thirst, they tasted in apprehension 
the bitterness of death. 

The conditions of warfare on the Continent 



36 Ube ffear of 2)eatb 



at the present moment differ considerably 
from those which have prevailed in any 
preceding war. The righting is more contin- 
uous, and the shell-fire more deadly and 
attended by more terror-provoking accompan- 
iments than any to which our soldiers have 
hitherto been exposed. But these circum- 
stances have failed to blast the courage of our 
men with the fear of death. I have ques- 
tioned many of them closely, immediately 
after their return from the front, while the 
impressions of battle were still lurid in their 
memory, and in no case have I discovered 
that the fear of death ever crossed their mind 
once they were in the thick of the fight. 
Most of those with whom I have talked ad- 
mitted that just before they went into the 
fighting-line they felt a little nervous, but not 
more nervous than they had felt on many a 
less serious occasion. 

The average Briton is not given to intro- 
spection. His capacity for analyzing his 
emotions varies with the quantity of Celtic 



•ffn IBattle 37 



blood in his veins. A Lowland Scot or a 
soldier from the midlands of England will 
give a much more reticent and superficial 
account of his feelings when in battle, than 
will a Scottish Highlander, a Welshman, or 
an Irishman. But yet, in the main, there is 
a singular unanimity about their conclusions. 
Practically all admit that they felt some 
apprehension for their personal safety on 
their way to the firing line for the first time. 
A young Welsh officer told me quite frankly 
that when he first came under shell -fire he 
felt tempted to turn and run; but he was 
arrested by the thought that he must set his 
men a good example, and this spirit of no- 
blesse oblige which has saved the honour 
of our Empire upon many a stricken field 
enabled him to steady himself and stick to 
his post. How this traditional spirit of the 
British officer reacts upon his men was made 
clear to me by a Gordon Highlander who 
was inured to battle on the retreat from Mons. 
Pie confessed to a feeling of extreme uneasi- 



38 XTbe ffear of Deatb 

ness until he noticed how calmly and collect- 
edly the officers were going about their duties. 
He drew immediate encouragement from this 
observation, and made up his mind that, 
come what might, no action of his should 
tarnish the honour of his regiment. At a 
later date he received promotion for consist- 
ently brave conduct in the field, and, though 
many times in very dangerous situations, 
he assured me that no fear of death or anxiety 
for his personal safety ever worried him after 
his first baptism of fire. He was severely 
wounded by machine-gun fire at Neuve 
Chapelle, and as he lay in the "no-man's- 
land" between the opposing trenches he had 
so little thought of danger that he raised 
himself on his elbow to admire and applaud 
the magnificent charge of a territorial bat- 
talion of his regiment. His movements 
apparently attracted the attention of an 
enemy sniper, and the arm on which he had 
raised himself was shattered, but even then 
he felt no fear of death. 



f n Battle 39 



An artillery officer, whose battery was 
hopelessly outranged, told me that his feel- 
ings, when he saw his friends and gunners 
being blown to pieces by the high-explosive 
shells that were raining upon them, were 
not those of anxiety for himself or regret at 
the fate of his friends. That came later, 
when he missed them at the mess-table. So 
far as he could analyse his emotions he be- 
lieved that his one feeling was that of furious 
anger at being unable to retaliate. 

One soldier, a dark-haired Celt, had a 
very lively recollection of all the events which 
immediately preceded his first entry into the 
fire-trench. The prospect of facing danger 
had the effect of quickening all his faculties 
of perception, and he told me that, as he 
marched to the trenches, every blade of grass 
seemed to have become a more vivid green; 
every wayside flower was clothed with a fresh 
beauty; the warbling of the birds was sweeter 
than he had ever heard it before, and the 
little fleecy clouds in the sky were as white as 



40 XTbe jfear of Deatb 

driven snow. He wondered, as he went, if 
he should live to see and hear these things 
on the morrow. He wondered whether he 
would be killed ; and what it would be like to 
die. He hoped that if he were to be killed 
his death would be instantaneous. He visu- 
alized himself dead. He thought of his 
friends at home, of incidents of his boyhood 
and his early manhood. Then, as he walked, 
he prayed; and he found that the prayer he 
was repeating in a whisper was not a prayer 
specially formulated for the occasion, but was 
a simple string of petitions which he had 
learned as a little child. 

We can well imagine that, to a man with 
such an introspective and sensitive mind, the 
actual experience of being under fire would 
be trying in the extreme; but, as a matter 
of fact, he found it less formidable than he 
expected; and, in analysing his feelings 
after his first spell of duty in the trenches, 
he could not recall any memory of fear. 
His chief feeling seems to have been one of 



An Battle 41 



acute irritation at the nerve-racking noise 
of shell-fire. Not a few soldiers have assured 
me that the noise of an artillery bombard- 
ment has caused them more distress than 
any other experience they have gone through, 
and one hardy Tyneside collier, who had 
been through much of the severe fighting 
on the peninsula of Gallipoli, told me that 
he had never had the least fear of death, 
but he always dreaded and shuddered at 
the noise of the big naval guns, and the 
reverberating concussion of exploding shells. 
On thinking his statement over, I came to 
the conclusion that, in all probability, his dis- 
tress of mind on hearing a shell burst was due 
to the fact that in the life of a collier an ex- 
plosion all too often means the entombment 
and death, by fire or asphyxiation, of many 
brave men. An explosion in a coal-pit is a 
danger which a collier faces daily. Though, 
probably, the fear of such explosions is not 
perpetually before him, the possibility of such 
an occurrence, with its hideous train of casu- 



42 TOe ffear of Beatb 

alties, is always lurking in his subconscious 
mind. We are all prone to measure new 
experiences by old standards. From his 
boyhood this man had been accustomed to 
regard an explosion as a frightful calamity, 
and explosions on the field of battle awakened 
in his mind precisely the same feelings as 
would the thought of such a catastrophe in 
his coal-pit. 

An officer who had seen much heavy 
fighting told me, without the slightest 
suggestion of boasting, that he had thor- 
oughly enjoyed every day at the front, and 
was anxious to get back to the thick of the 
fighting again. Before the war he had been 
for several months on a big-game shooting 
expedition. Much of his life had been 
occupied with adventure, and he regarded 
the war as a superior kind of sport. He had 
never felt the slightest fear either of wounds 
or death; and he was of opinion that in the 
hurricane of battle even a craven becomes a 
brave man. 



In Battle 43 



The truth seems to be that as the danger 
of death increases, the fear of it recedes. 
As in other paths of life, familiarity breeds 
contempt, and the anxiety which a young 
soldier feels on his first visit to the trenches 
rapidly gives way to a stolid indifference. 
Men become so inured to the hazards of war 
that they can actually play practical jokes 
on each other and on their enemies in the 
shell-torn, bullet-swept trenches. 

Whatever apprehensions a soldier may 
confess to having experienced on the way 
to battle, there is but one verdict as to the 
effect of the ordeal, and that is that every 
element of fear for one's personal safety 
is completely obliterated. To wait in the 
reserve trenches would seem to be much more 
nerve-racking than to be in the forefront 
of the fight. The fact seems to be that the 
mind is so occupied with the business in 
hand that there is no room for any thought of 
fear to obtrude itself. 

How this comes about may best be shown 



44 ft&e ffear of Beatb 

by an illustration. Let us imagine that the 
brain — the organ which links up the body 
with the sources of thought and action — is a 
railway terminus, into which run lines from 
all parts of the country. There are lines to 
and from the eyes, the ears, the feet, the 
hands, and every muscle in the body. In 
the heat of battle, trains loaded with mes- 
sages are running from every outlying station 
in the body to the terminus, while other 
trains laden with messages are racing on the 
down line to every muscle. On a well- 
ordered railway system certain trains have 
priority; while others are held back till the 
congestion of traffic is relieved and some 
of the metals are cleared. A wise station- 
master will see that a slow goods train does 
not get in the way and block the progress of 
a passenger express ; and the mind, acting in 
this r61e, takes care that no train laden with 
fear finds its way out of the terminus to throw 
the other traffic into confusion. There are 
no metals to spare for such a cargo; the 



Wounfcs ant> pain 45 

whole railway system is occupied with the 
supply of more urgent necessities. 

By a similar illustration one can explain 
the frequently repeated observation that in 
the heat of battle a soldier may sustain 
a formidable wound, and feel no pain what- 
ever, and even be unaware that he has been 
hit. The injured limb or organ despatches 
an express train along the line of some sen- 
sory nerve to the railway terminus in the 
brain; but on drawing near the terminus the 
signals are found to be against it, and it 
cannot force its way through the press of 
traffic into the station. It is therefore side- 
tracked. But just as an ordinary train will 
try to call the attention of the signalman by 
blowing its whistle when the signal is against 
it, so a sensation of pain may succeed in call- 
ing the attention of the brain to its existence 
by sending on a message not of pain, but of 
heaviness or pressure. This may have the 
effect of opening a path for the whole train 
to run through, and the wounded man begins 



46 XTbe fear of 2>eatb 

to discover he has been hit and hurt. But 
in many cases a long interval elapses between 
the infliction of a wound and the realization 
by the sufferer that he has been wounded. 

I have been informed by a soldier who had 
a large piece blown out of the side of his 
thigh, that he was quite unaware of his in- 
jury for several minutes. His attention was 
attracted by hearing his foot " squelch' ' 
every time he moved it. On looking down he 
saw that his boot was full of blood; then, 
almost immediately, he felt a dull ache in his 
thigh, followed very shortly by a sensation 
of acute pain. In his case, to return to our 
illustration, the messages of pain from his 
wounded thigh had been held up by the con- 
gestion of traffic near the terminus. We may 
imagine that the impeded train endeavoured 
to call the attention of the signalman, but 
failed to do so until a message, sent from 
the suburban station of Sight, not far from 
the terminus, got through, and informed the 
station-master that a very important train 



An Battle 47 



from a remote part of the country was being 
held up. The levers were then at once drawn, 
and the sensation of pain passed on to the 
sensorium. 

The illustration is a somewhat mechanical 
one, and may not satisfy either the physio- 
logist or the psychologist, but it will help 
to explain certain curious phenomena that 
have frequently provoked surprise. 

It is impossible to imagine a more trying 
experience than participation in a bayonet 
charge; but yet over and over again I have 
been assured that no fear enters a soldier's 
mind when he is taking part in one. A soft- 
voiced, quiet-looking soldier, who had re- 
turned home wounded, after taking part in 
no less than seven bayonet charges, informed 
me that he had never felt the slightest fear 
when engaged in this deadly work. He had 
no time to think of self. His orders were to 
storm a certain position, and he had done 
so. Other men have told me that they 
"saw red," as they leaped over the trench 



48 Ube ifear of Beatb 

parapet with bayonets fixed. This "seeing 
red" is probably more than a mere phrase, 
and may be due to a tremendous engorge- 
ment of the vessels of the retina or the visual 
centre with blood in consequence of the great 
emotional strain of the moment; but in no 
case has any soldier admitted to me that he 
felt the least fear of death, when, bayonet on 
rifle, he raced over the bullet-swept zone 
towards the opposing trench. 

The truth seems to be that in the frenzy 
of battle the soldier is affected by a kind 
of mental exaltation, a detachment from 
self, which renders him impervious to any 
thought of personal danger. 

" , . . . . . Corpora bello 

Objectant, pulchramque petunt per vulnera 
mortem." 

But even at a distance from the din of 
battle, and without the excitement which it 
begets, the call of duty can overcome the 
fear of death. 



fn Battle 49 



We have a daily illustration of this afforded 
by the conduct of the firemen in our great 
cities, or the resolute lifeboat men round our 
inhospitable coasts who are always ready, 
without flinching, to put their lives to the 
hazard in the performance of their tasks. 
And that higher sense of duty which blossoms 
into loyalty to a cause, or to one's friends, 
has enabled many a man to sacrifice his life 
without fear. Somewhere near the Franco- 
Belgian frontier is the grave of a nameless 
hero whose devotion to his comrades en- 
abled him to overcome the fear of death. 
The story is best told in the simple narrative 
of one of his fellow-soldiers : 

"He was one of our men, a private in the 
Royal Irish Regiment. We learned that he 
had been captured the previous day by a 
party of German cavalry, and had been held 
a prisoner at the farm where the Germans 
were in ambush for us. He tumbled to their 
game, and though he knew that if he made 
the slightest sound they would kill him, he 



50 Ube ffear of 2>eatb 

decided to make a dash to warn us of what 
was in store. He had more than a dozen 
bullets in him, and there was not the slightest 
hope for him. We carried him into a house 
until the fight was over, and then we buried 
him next day with military honours. His 
identification disc and everything else was 
missing, so that we could only put over his 
grave the tribute to a Greater: 

'He saved others: himself he could not save/ 

There wasn't a dry eye among us when we 
laid him to rest in that little village. " 

When the world was thrilled by the news 
of the appalling disaster to the Titanic, 
horror gave way to pride as we heard how 
many a man and woman on that doomed 
ship, touched by the finger of catastrophe, 
was transmuted from common clay into pure 
and heroic gold. But few stories in that 
record of noble deeds caught the popular 
imagination as did the plain tale of the Mar- 
coni operator, who, though one of the first 



Duts an& tbc if ear of Deatb 51 

on the stricken liner to know what her fate 
must be, stuck at his post and sent message 
after message through the midnight air to 
summon help that came only too late. He 
kept on performing his duty calmly, until his 
cabin was flooded and his instruments could 
send messages no longer, holding his life a 
very little thing, and the fear of death of 
none account while his duty had to be done. 
But probably it is in the nursing and 
medical professions that one will find the 
most plentiful illustrations of the fact that 
the call of duty can overcome the fear of 
death. In their daily work nurses and doctors 
are continually exposed to personal danger, 
yet such is the strength of their sense of duty 
that no consideration of risk enters into their 
calculations when plague or pestilence has to 
be faced. They will be careful, as far as 
possible, to protect themselves from infec- 
tion, but they will not be held back from their 
duty, trembling and afraid, by any craven 
fear of death. 



52 ZTbe fear of Deatb 

Thanks to the epoch-making discovery of 
diphtheritic antitoxin by Behring and Roux 
we do not now see so many of those appall- 
ing cases of laryngeal diphtheria which used 
to asphyxiate little children as with the ruth- 
less fingers of some strangling Thug, or if we 
do meet with them we are not so powerless 
to combat them. But before the days of 
antitoxin, and even since then, many a nurse 
or doctor, at grave personal risk, has sucked 
the diphtheritic membrane from a child's 
throat, and made no boast of it. For before 
the face of duty the fear of death shrinks into 
a very little thing. 

In November, 1898, at the Allgemeines 
Krankenhaus in Vienna — at that time the 
largest hospital in Europe — a tragedy oc- 
curred which deserves to be commemorated 
in letters of gold. Some time previously a 
Commission of Austrian doctors had been at 
work in India investigating bubonic plague. 
They brought home with them a quantity 
of plague bacilli, and a series of experiments 



H)ut£ an& tbe jfear of 2>eatb 53 

upon animals was instituted to discover, if 
possible, the way in which the disease was 
propagated, and to seek for a remedy. 

A laboratory attendant contracted plague 
in a very virulent form, and a young doctor, 
Hermann Muller, whom the man had been 
assisting, voluntarily undertook the duty 
of looking after him. He was assisted by 
two nurses who also volunteered. The 
man died, and Dr. Muller not only placed 
him in his coffin, but personally undertook 
the duty of disinfecting the room in which 
he had expired. In this, his ardour outran 
his discretion, for he scraped the plaster off 
the walls and ceiling of the room, a precaution 
which was quite unnecessary, as the same 
end could have been achieved by a powerful 
antiseptic spray, or by thorough fumigation. 
While doing this he must necessarily have 
inhaled much infected dust. When his task 
was completed he isolated himself for a per- 
iod, and during this time he himself discovered 
with the microscope, in the matter which he 



54 XTfee JFear of Beatb 

coughed up from his lungs, a large number of 
plague bacilli. He had developed plague in 
its deadliest form. He knew that he was 
a doomed man. He locked the door of his 
room; wrote a letter to his "chief" announc- 
ing the fact that he had contracted plague 
in its pneumonic form, and saying that as 
he had only a few days to live he hoped no 
one would expose himself to danger by com- 
ing to his aid; wrote another pathetic little 
note of farewell to his parents, and, having 
pushed his missives under the door, where 
they were found next day, lay down on his 
bed to die. He had done his duty, and in 
doing it had overcome the terror of death. 
To the eternal credit of his profession let it 
be said that he was not left to die alone. 

Another luminous example comes to mind. 
Dr. Arthur Frame Jackson, a young man 
of great promise, arrived in China, whither 
he had gone as a medical missionary, just at 
the time when a severe epidemic of bubonic 
plague was driving the panic-stricken peas- 



1Relf0fon an& jfear of H)eatb 55 

ants in a wild stampede before it. It was 
necessary, that the pestilence might be 
controlled, that this stampede should be 
arrested, and that only natives free from all 
signs of disease, and with no record of con- 
tact with plague-stricken persons, should be 
allowed to pass through the cordon. Jack- 
son volunteered for the work of inspection, 
and, with no thought of self, but with that 
fine loyalty to duty which all who knew 
him expected from him, spent his days and 
nights in the arduous and dangerous work of 
examining suspects. He contracted plague 
and died, but his name will always live in the 
annals of medicine as one of that long line of 
brave men for whom death had no fears, 
because duty called. 

A well-grounded, firmly established reli- 
gious faith is the best possession for a man's 
last hours, and in the consuming flame of 
religious devotion which kindles so many 
illumined lives the fear of death is shrivelled 
up like a vagrant moth. 



56 Ubc ffear of Deatb 

Father Damien dedicated his life to the 
service of the lepers on the island of Molokai, 
fought with death, faced death, and lived 
with death in that remote charnel-house 
every day for years, and died a leper. And 
in -many of the darkest places of earth, far 
from home and kindred, and in daily peril 
of death there are men and women who 
dedicate their lives fearlessly to the service 
of God and humanity, because an altar fire 
of religious faith burns in their souls. 

Out of the pages of martyrology we can 
gather many proofs that religious faith can 
overcome the fear of death. Take, for 
instance, the case of Archibald Campbell, 
first Marquis of Argyll. He was found guilty 
of "high treason" — a comprehensive term 
in those days — and sentenced to death by 
beheading at the Cross of Edinburgh on 
May 27th, 1 661. All through life he had 
been a somewhat nervous and timid man, 
but after his condemnation he said, "I am 
as content to be here," among the prisoners 



IRelfgton an& ffear of 2)eatb 57 

in the Tolbooth, "as in the Castle, and I was 
as content in the Castle as in the Tower of 
London, and there I was as content as when 
at liberty; and I hope to be as content upon 
the scaffold as in any of them all. " 

Faith triumphed over fear, and to the 
very end of life he bore himself with a gallant 
equanimity. He slept with the utmost 
composure during the two nights that inter- 
vened between his sentence and its execution, 
as was proved by David Dickson, who shared 
his cell. On the scaffold, which he mounted 
without trepidation, he was perfectly un- 
perturbed. His physician felt his pulse and 
found it beating at the usual rate, regularly 
and strongly. A preacher in the surrounding 
crowd, George Hutcheson by name, called to 
him, "My Lord, hold your grip siccar. " 
"Mr. Hutcheson," Argyll replied, "You 
know what I said in the chamber, I am not 
afraid to be surprised with fear. " 

And so he died, giving with his own hand 
the signal for the fall of the knife. He was 



58 Ubc feat of 2>eatb 

a man who, on the admission of himself and 
his contemporaries, was of a nervous disposi- 
tion, but his religious faith enabled him to 
overcome the fear of death. 

James Guthrie, another martyr of the 
blood-red Scottish Covenanting times was 
hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh less than 
a week after the execution of Argyll. On 
the morning of his execution, when asked 
how he felt he said, "Very well, this is the 
day which the Lord hath made; let us be 
glad and rejoice in it. " When on the scaffold 
he said, "I take God to witness, I would not 
exchange this scaffold with the palace or the 
mitre of the greatest prelate in Britain. " 

In the pages of Old Mortality there is a 
caricature, unworthy of the magic pen of 
Sir Walter, of a young Covenanting preacher 
called the Rev. Ephraim Macbriar. The 
prototype of this character has been identi- 
fied by authorities as Hugh Mackail, who 
was martyred in his thirty-sixth year after 
enduring the unspeakable torture of "the 



TReltaion an& ffear of Beatb 59 

boot/' When lying under sentence he said, 
"I am not so cumbered about dying as I 
have often been about preaching a sermon," 
and his last words were, "Welcome Death." 

The story of the burning of Ridley and 
Latimer is a locus classicus in martyrology. 
The evening before his death Ridley's 
brother offered to watch with him all night. 
"No, no," he replied, "I shall go to bed, 
and, God willing, shall sleep as quietly 
to-night as ever I did in my life." Next 
day, side by side with Latimer, chained to 
the same stake, over against the hoary pile 
of Balliol College, Ridley was burned to 
death; and his companion's words are still 
as redolent of the flower of bravery as the 
day they were spoken: "Be of good comfort, 
Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall 
this day light such a candle, by God's grace, 
in England, as I trust shall never be put 
out." 

And there was no fear in the heroic heart 
of Archbishop Cranmer, when, girdled with 



60 Ube jfear of Beatb 

fire, he thrust his right hand into the flames 
crying, "That unworthy right hand." 

Every country and every age has had 
its martyrs for their faith; and an impartial 
study of the records must persuade even 
the most incredulous that religious devotion 
is the strongest antidote to the fear of death. 

When brought into conflict with a deep- 
rooted natural endowment such as the 
maternal instinct the acquired fear of death, 
however overpowering it may be in relation 
to the other facts of life, is utterly vanquished. 
The maternal instinct is latent in every 
woman, and, however well concealed it may 
be underneath the multifarious activities of 
the modern daughter of Eve, it is ready to 
spring into vitality at the call of love. For 
some women motherhood must always be a 
perilous experience, fraught with danger and 
attended by much suffering ; but I have never 
known a woman, happily married, of her own 
free will permanently refuse to wear her 
crown, even though it should prove to be a 



/IDaternal ITnsttnct an& Deatb 61 

crown of thorns worn on the way to the grave. 
When in general practice I was privileged to 
pilot many women through their hour of 
anguish into a haven of great joy; and 
sometimes it was necessary to warn them 
that a similar adventure could not be em- 
barked upon without great danger to their 
life. They listened, and, apparently, took 
the warning to heart; but in some instances, 
after a few years, either the desire for another 
child to be a companion to the first, whose 
loneliness they grieved at, or the ache in the 
empty heart from which death had stolen the 
delight of their eyes, obliterated all memory 
of the warning, and their feet went down to 
death again that they might fulfil the noblest 
destiny of their sex. There is no halo on 
their brow, there is no Victoria Cross on their 
breast, and they pass unnoticed and un- 
known along our city streets; but no soldier- 
hero can teach them bravery, nor any mar- 
tyred saint contempt of death. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE FEAR OF DEATH {continued) 



63 



"There is pain and sorrow enough in the world for us 
to spare investing death with grim terrors of our own. 
There is no terror to the dying about death at all. " 

A. C. Benson^ 



11 So live, that when the summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan, that moves 
To that mysterious realm where each shall take 
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Thou go not like the quarry slave at night 
Scourged to his dungeon ; but sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave 
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. " 

William Cullen Bryant. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE FEAR OF DEATH {continued) 

When a normal man is in perfect health 
he has, undoubtedly, in some degree, a 
salutary fear of death. This fear is the 
protest of his vitality against its extinction. 
But, when his hour comes, I am firmly 
convinced that in almost every case the fear 
is lost. 

We can adduce evidence in support of 
this opinion from three sources: (i) The wit- 
ness of history; (2) the testimony of those 
who have been threatened by apparently 
inevitable death, and escaped; and (3) the 
evidence supplied by those who, in the course 
of their work, have seen many people die. 

In great measure the intensity with which 

men fear death is a matter of temperament. 
s 65 



66 Ube fear of Beatb 

All through life Dr. Samuel Johnson was a 
meticulous valetudinarian obsessed by the 
fear of death. Once, when Boswell asked 
him, "Is not the fear of death natural to 
man?" Johnson replied, "So much so, sir, 
that the whole of life is but keeping away 
the thought of it." Over and over again in 
the immortal pages of his carefully chronicled 
small-talk we are reminded of his shrinking 
dread of death. He shrank from it partly 
through fear of the physical act of dissolution, 
and partly because he stood in awe of the 
fate that might await him after death. He 
once quarrelled violently with his biographer, 
who persisted in discussing the subject. 
Boswell ventured to ask him: "But may we 
not fortify our minds for the approach of 
death?" In a passion, Johnson thundered, 
"No, sir, let it alone! It matters not how a 
man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying 
is not of importance, it lasts so short a time. " 
But when Boswell, with that pertinacity 
which is half his passport to immortality, 



Beatb of 2>r* Samuel Jobnson 67 



returned to the theme, Johnson lost his tem- 
per and roared, ' ' Give us no more of this ! 
Don't let us meet to-morrow. " 

On Easter Monday, 1784, a few months 
before his end came, he wrote to his friend, 
the Reverend Dr. Taylor, "O! my friend, 
the approach of death is very dreadful. I 
am afraid to think on that which I know I 
cannot avoid." 

And yet, in spite of this grisly horror of 
death that had haunted him all his days, 
he died bravely and unafraid. During his 
last illness he asked his physician, Dr. 
Brocklesby, to tell him whether he could 
recover, and insisted on an unequivocal 
answer. On learning that, so far as human 
knowledge could tell, there was no hope of 
recovery, he said, "Then I will take no more 
physic, not even my opiates; for I have 
prayed that I may render up my soul to 
God unclouded." He refused all alcoholic 
stimulants for the same reason. At the 
end he passed through the great portal with- 



68 Ube jfear of Deatb 

out a trace of fear. Cawston, who sat with 
him the night before he died, bore witness 
that "no man could appear more collected, 
more devout, or less terrified at the thoughts 
of the approaching minute, " and he breathed 
his last so peacefully "that his attendants 
hardly perceived when his dissolution took 
place." 

There was no fear in Anne Boleyn's heart 
when she said, "The executioner is, I hear, 
very expert, and my neck is very slender," 
and she put her hands round her neck 
and laughed heartily; nor in the words 
with which Sir Thomas More addressed his 
friends as he ascended the scaffold: "See me 
safe up, for my coming down I can shift for 
myself." As Addison wrote, "He main- 
tained the same cheerfulness of heart upon 
the scaffold which he used to show at his 
table; and upon laying his head on the block 
gave instances of that good humour with 
which he had always entertained his friends 
in the most ordinary occurrence. His death 



Execution of Sir XPGL IRalefgb 69 

was of a piece with his life. There was 
nothing in it new, forced, or affected. He did 
not look upon the severing his head from his 
body as a circumstance that ought to produce 
any change in the disposition of his mind; 
and, as he died under a fixed and settled hope 
of immortality, he thought any unusual de- 
gree of sorrow and concern improper to such 
an occasion as had nothing in it which could 
deject or terrify him. " 

There were features of dramatic grandeur 
about the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh. 
He was a man of extraordinary diversity 
of character; a courtier, a brave adventurer 
accustomed to put his life to the hazard on 
sea and land, a historian in the leisure of his 
prison days, and something of a poet. In 
addition, his outlook on life was that of a 
philosopher, and he was deeply religious. 
That he loved life is proved by the strenuous 
way in which, shaking with ague but not 
fear, he pleaded his cause at his trial. He 
heard sentence of death pronounced on him 



70 Ubc jfear of Deatb 



without flinching, and when taken back to 
his cell remarked philosophically, "The 
world itself is but a larger prison out of 
which some are daily selected for execution. " 
We catch an echo of the secret of his brave 
and undaunted spirit in his beautiful lines: 

"Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, 
My staff of truth to walk upon, 
My scrip of joy, immortal diet, 

My bottle of salvation : 
My gown of glory, Hope's true gage, 
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage." 

In his "Narrative of the last hours of Sir 
Walter Raleigh, " that industrious chiffonnier, 
that quaint collector of unconsidered but 
priceless trifles, Isaac Disraeli, says: "Raw- 
leigh's cheerfulness was so remarkable and 
his fearlessness of death so marked, that the 
Dean of Westminster, who attended him, 
at first wondering at the hero, reprehended 
the lightness of his manner, but Rawleigh 
gave God thanks that he had never feared 
death, for it was but an opinion, and an 



Execution of Sit TO, IRaletab 71 

imagination ; and, as for the manner of death, 
he would rather die so than of a burning 
fever ; and that some might have made shows 
outwardly, but he felt the joy within. The 
dean says that he made no more of his death 
than if he had been going to take a journey. " 
On the morning of his execution his spirits 
were at their highest, and he was brimful 
of a kindly humour. He died with a grand 
air; embracing his executioner, who knelt to 
ask his forgiveness; examining the axe with 
the scrutiny of a connoisseur, and, as he laid 
it down remarking, ' 'This is a sharp medicine, 
but a sound cure for all diseases. " Then he 
commended himself to God, desiring the 
crowd of spectators to pray for him, and laid 
his neck upon the block ; and when the execu- 
tioner, unnerved by the fine nobility and 
quiet courage of his victim, hesitated to per- 
form his task, it was Raleigh's calm impera- 
tive ''Strike, man!" that urged him to the 
deed. One of the contemporary letter- 
writers quoted by Disraeli says, "In all the 



72 TOe feat of Deatb 

time he was upon the scaffold, and before, 
there appeared not the least alteration in 
him, either in his voice or countenance, but 
he seemed as free from all manner of appre- 
hension as if he had been come thither 
rather to be a spectator than a sufferer. ' ' He 
died in the grand manner of his time, a 
courtier, and a gallant Christian gentleman. 

During the last uneasy years of his life 
Oliver Cromwell was obsessed by melancholy 
and strange anxieties; but his dying words 
show that whatever fear he had of man, he 
had none of death. "My desire," he said, 
"is to make what haste I may to be gone." 

When Queen Mary II was dying she said 
to Archbishop Tillotson, who had paused 
in reading a prayer, "My Lord, why do you 
not go on? I am not afraid to die," words 
which found a singular echo in the last 
utterance of Charles Darwin, who, with his 
last breath, said, "I am not in the least afraid 
to die." 

When John Sterling, at the close of a 



Zbc 2>sfrt0 Do IRot ffear Deatb 73 

short and somewhat sorrowful life, lay dying, 
he wrote a letter of farewell to his friend 
Carlyle, of which Mr. A. C. Benson, says, 
"In its dignity, its nobleness, its fearlessness, 
it is one of the finest human documents I 
know. " It is alive with the breath of warm 
affection and calm courage. One sentence 
is all we need quote to show that, like so 
many others before and since, he had no 
fear of death. He wrote: "I tread the com- 
mon road into the great darkness, without 
any thought of fear, and with very much of 
hope." 

When that brave explorer, Robert Falcon 
Scott, lay waiting for death in the little tent 
on the deserted, snow-swept ice-field, he 
wrote with his frost-bitten fingers many 
messages to his friends, that prove with 
what supreme courage he met his end. A 
few words are enough to show his dauntless 
spirit: "The Great God has called me . . . 
but take comfort in that I die at peace with 
the world and myself . . . not afraid." 



74 ^&e Jfear of Deatb 

In death, as Isaac Disraeli has said, "The 
habitual associations of the natural character 
are most likely to prevail. " Thus, Rabelais, 
who lived a cynic, died with a cynicism upon 
his lips : ' ' I am going to seek a great perhaps ' ' ; 
while Cecil Rhodes, enthusiast and empire- 
builder, was heard on his death-bed to repeat 
the words of Tennyson, 

"So much to do: so little done," 

and Dr. Adam, for many years headmaster 
of the Royal High School in Edinburgh, 
where Sir Walter Scott was one of his pupils, 
ended his life with the words, "You may go, 
boys! It is growing dark." 

It falls to the lot of most doctors to see 
much of death, and I have watched by the 
bedside of the dying of many classes and of 
all ages. I have seen the little silken thread 
on which a child's life hung — a life so far 
as one could tell of infinite potentialities for 
good — snap suddenly, leaving only a terrible 
sense of the mystery and inscrutableness of 



ttbe E)£fn0 2)o IRot Jf eat 2>eatb 75 

it all ; and I have fought with death, and lost 
the battle, over the beds of young men and 
women in the first flush of maturity; I have 
seen strong men and women cut down in their 
prime; I have watched the old totter down the 
slope into the twilight, and at the end fall 
asleep like little children, and I say it with a 
due sense of the importance of the statement, 
that my experience has been that, however 
much men and women may, when in 
the full vigour of health, fear death, when 
their hour approaches the fear is almost 
invariably lulled into quietness, and they 
face the end with calmness and a serene 
mind. 

A man caught in the toils of severe but 
not mortal pain will sometimes gasp out the 
trembling question, "Am I dying?" But I 
cannot remember ever having been asked 
this question precisely in these words by 
anyone who was rapidly approaching that 

"Undiscovered country from whose bourne 
No traveller returns." 



76 TTbe jfear of Beatb 

Most dying persons, with the exception of 
patients suffering from consumption, are 
aware that they are dying. They need no 
human tongue to tell them; they know 
intuitively, but they tend to keep the know- 
ledge to themselves. Sometimes a man who 
is critically ill, who is, in fact, dying, will 
ask the question, not, "Am I going to die?" 
but couched in other language, though with 
the same essential meaning, "Am I going to 
get better?" And while one hesitates, to 
choose the kindliest word with which to 
make reply, the sick man will often add, "I 
am not afraid to know the truth. " 

The well known spes phthisica or "con- 
sumptives' hope" is an interesting manifesta- 
tion of the psychology of the sick. Many 
patients dying of consumption manifest a 
cheery optimism that is often most reassuring 
for the relatives, and sometimes a little dis- 
concerting for the physician, who knows that 
the patient's statements as to his sense of well- 
being are harshly contradicted by the physi- 



Spes pbtbfsfca 77 

cal signs of his disease. A consumptive 
patient, after the disease reaches a certain 
stage, is always ''feeling better," and looks 
forward eagerly to the day when he will be 
able to resume his former occupation. He 
rarely believes that he is dying, and I have 
been assured by a young man a few hours 
before his death, and so weak that he could 
hardly whisper, that he would be all right 
in a month or two, when the warmer weather 
should come. 

A medical friend who has an extensive 
experience of consumptive patients in a 
large workhouse hospital, tells me that in a 
ward in which there are many patients in 
advanced stages of the disease, and among 
whom a death is a very frequent occurrence, 
the survivors treat these catastrophes with 
a stolid nonchalance. Apparently each ap- 
propriates for himself the gratifying belief 
that he is immune to the common lot which 
is overwhelming his companions. They may 
all die, he is "feeling better." Nowhere 



78 TLbc tfcav of Deatb 

does Young's line, "All men think all men 
mortal but themselves, " find a more illumi- 
nating commentary than in a ward of con- 
sumptive patients. 

Every doctor has known men and women, 
whom their intimates would never have 
regarded as being cast in any particularly 
heroic mould, evince a wonderful self-control 
when confronted suddenly, as not infre- 
quently happens, with two weighty alterna- 
tives, viz., the prospect of an immediate 
serious operation from which they may not 
recover, and the certain alternative of death. 
Very often, in such circumstances, the pa- 
tient has been calmer than the calmest of his 
friends, and has come to a decision with a 
clear judgment, and with no sign of fear. 

Even in the most timid men and women 
there would seem to be a hidden reserve 
of courage stored up against emergencies, 
and it is when he is faced by the big things 
of life that the best that is in a man is drawn 
to the surface. 



flo ffear in tbe Sbafcow Deatb 79 



Some years ago I made the acquaintance 
of a nurse who, a few months before, in the 
midst of her work had been seized by a for- 
midable complication, viz., the perforation of 
a gastric ulcer from which she suffered. Her 
surgical experience had taught her that her 
condition was one of jeopardy, and she knew 
that, though an operation might save her, 
death stared her in the face. The operation 
was performed successfully, and she recov- 
ered. I asked her whether, in the shadow of 
imminent death, she had felt any fear, and her 
answer was, "No, I have a natural human 
shrinking from death when in perfect health, 
but when on the edge of the precipice I had 
absolutely no fear." 

Those who meet death suddenly by ac- 
cident, in all probability are not "surprised 
of fear." A young man who fell from the 
roof of a lofty building and escaped, miracu- 
lously, with a handful of bruises, assured me 
that, in his long fall to earth, which seemed 
to cover an eternity, he did not feel the 



8o TTbe jfear of 2>eatb 

slightest fear; and I have been told by three 
medical men, each of whom narrowly escaped 
drowning under entirely different circum- 
stances, that when their fate seemed certain 
all fear was taken from them. One of them 
tells me that at the moment of his greatest 
danger he felt quite unconcerned, and did not 
experience the slightest anxiety until he was 
about to be rescued, when he was unexpect- 
edly assailed by a timorous wonder as to 
whether the rescue-boat would reach him in 
time. So long as he had no hope of safety, 
he had no fear. Another assures me that the 
alarm which attended his discovery that he 
was being swept away powerless before the 
tide rapidly gave place, as his strength be- 
came exhausted, to a comfortable condition 
of indifference, and his last thought before he 
lost consciousness was one of quiet amuse- 
ment. He saw a fussy but futile gentleman 
dash frantically from the beach into the sea, 
with heroic but indeterminate intentions of 
bringing succour, and, after thoroughly wet- 



/IDr. B. G. Benson's Experiences 81 

ting himself, retire hastily to the beach again. 
This was the last thing he remembers seeing 
before unconsciousness supervened, and the 
sight provoked him to the thought, "What 
a funny thing to do. " 

Dr. Livingstone, seized and mauled by a 
lion, felt neither pain nor fear, and from his 
experience ventured to suggest that a kindly 
Providence mitigates in like fashion the 
suffering of animals when they fall a prey to 
the carnivora. On one occasion he jocularly 
informed an interviewer that, when in the 
lion's clutches, his only thought was which 
part of him the beast would devour first. 

That most delightful essayist, Mr. A. C. 
Benson, puts on record in "Along the Road" 
his personal experience when face to face 
with death. When climbing in the Alps he 
fell over the edge of a crevasse, and for a 
period of twenty minutes there was nothing 
between him and death but the strands of a 
frail rope and the devotion of his friend and 
a guide. He says: "Suddenly it dawned 



82 Zbc jfear of Beatb 

upon me that I was doomed. . . . The 
strange thing was that I had no sense of fear, 
only a dim wonder as to how I should die, 
and whether the fall would kill me at once. 
I had no edifying thoughts. I did not review 
my past life or my many failings. I wondered 
that a second fatal accident should happen so 
soon at the same place, thought a little of my 
relatives, and of Eton where I was a master, 
wondered who would succeed to my boarding- 
house, and how my pupils would be arranged 
for. I remember, too, speculating what 
death would be like. . . . Then I think 
I did become unconscious for a moment, 
my last thought being a sort of anxious 
longing to get the thing over as soon as 
possible.'' 

Fortunately for the literature of our time 
he was saved by the magnificent bravery of 
the guide and his companion, and in sum- 
ming up the matter, he says: "The time had 
not seemed at all long to me; and, as I have 
said, I had no touch of pain, only faintness 



if acfna Deatb 83 



and discomfort, and no sense either of dread 
or fear." 

Our third source of evidence for the state- 
ment that the dying do not fear death is the 
testimony of those who have been by many 
death-beds. Personally, I have never seen 
anyone about to die evince the slightest fear 
of the impending change, and this experience 
is supported by a great body of weighty medi- 
cal opinion. Sir Benjamin Brodie who, a 
century ago, was the acknowledged doyen 
of surgery in England, has left the following 
record in one of his conversational essays: 
"I have myself never known but two in- 
stances in which, in the act of dying, there 
were manifest indications of the fear of death. 
The individuals to whom I allude were un- 
expectedly destroyed by haemorrhage, which, 
from peculiar circumstances, which I need 
not now explain, it was impossible to sup- 
press. " Brodie was a man of very wide 
experience which ranged through every social 
grade from Windsor Castle to the slums of 



84 XTbe ff ear of Deatb 

London, and in his day he must have seen 
many people die. But only two, an infin- 
itesimal proportion of the whole, showed 
fear. 

That men and women can school them- 
selves to face, without flinching, the steady 
approach of inevitable death is proved from 
the conduct of many sufferers from incurable 
disease who know that their days are num- 
bered. At the present moment I know three 
sufferers from cancer, inoperable and incura- 
ble, for whom all that can be done has been 
done without avail. Each knows that the 
final stage of the journey has been entered 
upon; but each preserves a calm and un- 
troubled mind, and is ready to face the end 
whenever it may come. One, a woman, is 
buoyed up by a confident religious faith, and 
she looks forward to death as 

"Only a step into the open air 
Out of a tent already luminous 
With light that shines through its transparent 
walls." 



Sir 3* 3F. 6oo&bart'5 StufcE 85 

The other two are men, who find consola- 
tion in a rough-hewn philosophy of their 
own. They believe, with Montaigne, that 
"Death is a part of the constitution of the 
universe; it is a part of the life of the world. " 

The late Sir J. F. Goodhart, one of the most 
eminent of London's consulting physicians, 
and an authority of world-wide renown upon 
the diseases of children, when a resident 
doctor in Guy's Hospital arranged with the 
sister in charge of his wards that he should 
be called to every patient who seemed to be 
dying. "I wanted," he says, "apart from 
my duties, to obtain also some actual know- 
ledge of facts that foretell immediate dissolu- 
tion. " And out of those trying experiences 
he gathered these grains of comfort: "I am 
never tired of saying, because I am sure it is 
as true as it is comforting, although in op- 
position to the general belief, that death has 
no terror for the sick man," and also this: 
"There is nothing terrible to the dying in 
death itself. The veil between two worlds is 



86 Zbc ff ear of 2)eatb 

but a cloud, and one passes through it im- 
perceptibly. " 

Sir William Osier, scholarly humanist 
and erudite physician, has placed his opinion 
on record in the following words: "I have 
careful notes of about five hundred death- 
beds, studied particularly with reference to 
the modes of death and the sensations of the 
dying. Ninety suffered bodily pain or dis- 
tress of one sort or another; eleven showed 
mental apprehension; two positive terror; one 
expressed spiritual exaltation; one bitter 
remorse. The great majority gave no sign 
one way or the other; like their birth, their 
death was a sleep and a forgetting." 

Criminal psychology is an interesting 
study, and although one shrinks from making 
any general deductions from the conduct of 
murderers about to suffer capital punishment, 
their bearing in the last few moments of life 
is instructive. 

Some behave with a bovine indifference; 
others make a mighty show of bravado; and 



Blejanoer Smftb's Essas 87 

others again manifest a curious interest in 
the lesser affairs of the world which they are 
soon about to leave. I cannot vouch for the 
truth of the following incident, which I find 
in Alexander Smith's exquisite essay, A 
Lark's Flight, but equally remarkable dis- 
plays of insouciance have been made upon 
the scaffold: 

"It is said that the championship of 
England was to be decided at some little 
distance from London on the morning of 
the day on which Thurtell was executed, and 
that, when he came out on the scaffold, he 
inquired privily of the executioner if the result 
had yet become known. Jack Ketch was not 
aware, and Thurtell expressed his regret that 
the ceremony in which he was the chief actor 
should take place so inconveniently early in 
the day." 

There is more than a gleam of pawky 
humour in the incident recounted by Sir 
Melville L. MacNaghten in his book of 
reminiscences. Fowler and Millsom, the 



88 Ube ffear ot Deatb 

Muswell Hill murderers, were executed to- 
gether; but as Fowler, in the dock, had made 
a violent attempt to get at Millsom, who had 
turned Queen's evidence, they were kept 
apart upon the scaffold, and a man, Seaman, 
who was to be executed with them, was 
placed on the trap-door between them. At 
this, the penultimate moment of his life, a 
quaint conceit would seem to have been born 
in the mind of Seaman, who was heard to say : 

"This is the first time as ever I was a 

peacemaker. " The words prove that all his 
faculties were alive; but he was obviously, 
as Sir Melville suggests, "insensible of mor- 
tality." 

Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the 
Howard Association, and author of Known 
to the Police, is thoroughly acquainted with 
the mind of the criminal in its many phases, 
and he has procured much valuable infor- 
mation as to the conduct and character of 
murderers. On one occasion he asked the 
chaplain of a large prison to tell him whether 



Gonfcemneo Criminals 89 

sorrow, remorse, or fear were ever shown by 
men about to pay the penalty for a premedi- 
tated murder. The chaplain's reply was 
"that he had performed his last sad offices 
for a considerable number of such prisoners, 
and he had discovered neither fear nor re- 
morse in any of them. " 

A prison doctor who has had a large ex- 
perience of judicial executions informs me 
that he has never seen a criminal on his way 
to the scaffold betray any outward evidence 
of fear. This fact he attributes in a large 
measure to the careful but painful minis- 
trations of the prison chaplains, to whose 
work he paid a well-merited tribute of praise. 

We must draw a line of sharp distinction 
between the fear of death, and reluctance 
to die. The latter is often the outcome of a 
torturing anxiety as to the welfare and future 
happiness of those who are about to be left 
behind. When the father of a family is cut 
down by a mortal disease in the midtime of 
his days, his last moments are often harassed, 



90 Ube jpear of Deatb 

not by the fear of death itself, but by a 
nameless dread that his demise may mean 
hardship, distress, and possibly poverty for 
his widow and children, for whom he has 
been unable to make adequate provision. 
I remember attending a young man, married 
for barely a year, who died from heart-failure 
supervening on pneumonia. A few hours 
before the end came he realized that he was 
dying, and his distress of mind was most 
poignant. His wife was expecting soon to 
become a mother, and his one thought was 
of her. His faint but constantly repeated 
cry was, "My little girl. What will my little 
girl do?" But when a solemn promise had 
been given that his wife and unborn child 
would be taken care of and provided for, 
his distress melted into a great calm, and he 
sank into unconsciousness, which gradually 
deepened into death, comforted and unafraid. 
It was a similar hideous anxiety that, 
more than Antarctic cold and the pangs of 
hunger, darkened the last brave hours of 



Deatb of Captain Scott 91 

Captain Scott. In the many letters he 
wrote during the last few days of life with his 
dying or dead companions stretched in the 
little tent beside him, there were no words 
either of complaint or fear; but over and over 
again there was the cry that those dependent 
upon himself and his fellow-sufferers, should 
not be left desolate. Indeed the very last 
entry which his dying fingers wrote was : 

"For God's sake, look after our people." 

Any doctor who has had much experience 
of hospital practice will readily pay a tribute 
of admiration to that large body of people, 
who, by an unwarrantable limitation of the 
term, are known as the working classes. 
Their patience in sickness is extraordinary, 
and is often a reproach to those who are more 
fortunately situated, while their bravery 
is beyond all praise. A man who has been 
mangled by machinery, or been bruised and 
battered out of all semblance to a human 
being by some terrible explosion — a clod of 



92 XTbe 3f ear of Beatb 

common clay — will show a brave and un- 
daunted heart when called to face the un- 
known mysteries of a formidable operation, 
or when he can hear about his bed "The wind 
of Death's imperishable wing." And the 
working woman in like case is no less brave. 
For herself she has no fear, but her heart is 
sore for her little ones; and if some kindly 
nurse wins her confidence she will confess that 
her tears are not the expression of any pity 
or anxiety for herself, but are wrung out of 
her heart when she wonders what is to become 
of her children when their mother is taken 
from them. We are, here, face to face with 
one of the things that make it hard to die. It 
is the parting from objects or persons that 
hold a large place in our affections; for the 
ties of human love are too exquisitely tender 
to be harshly torn asunder without provok- 
ing acute pain. Dr. Johnson, with a wonder- 
ful insight into the human heart, spoke no 
more than the truth when he said to his 
old pupil Garrick, who had been showing 



Gbarlotte IBronte'a Deatb 93 

him his possessions, and the beauty of his 
new home at Hampton, "Ah! David, David, 
it is things like these that make a death-bed 
terrible. " 

It was not the fear of death, but simply 
reluctance to die, that forced from the lips 
of Charlotte Bronte, whose ears had caught 
some whispered petition that God would 
spare her, the pathetic cry, "Oh! I am not 
going to die, am I ? He will not separate us, 
we have been so happy." 

But it was the numbing sense of pain at the 
thought that the few, brief, happy months, 
in a life that all along had been lived in the 
atmosphere of tragedy, were to come to an 
end, and the dawning of the knowledge 
that she must part from the husband for 
whom she had waited so patiently, and not 
live to know the joys of motherhood of 
which she had dreamed, that wrung this cry 
from her heart. 



CHAPTER V 
THE PAINLESSNESS OF DEATH 



95 



11 'AvaLcrdyrov 6 66.vo.tos." 

Diogenes the Epicurean. 

"If I had strength enough to hold a pen I would write 
down how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die. " 

Dr. William Hunter (his last words). 

"In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the 
act of death annihilates sensation. " 

COLTON. 



96 



CHAPTER V 

THE PAINLESSNESS OF DEATH 

Is it a painful thing to die? This is a 
question which, unuttered, must have passed 
through the minds of all who have ever 
given a thought to death. In all likelihood 
there is as little pain in the act of death as 
there is in falling asleep. In considering this 
matter we must be careful to limit our issue. 
We are not discussing whether disease is 
attended by pain for the individual, or 
whether the death of some dear one provokes 
pain in the hearts of the bereaved. We wish 
to ascertain, as nearly as we can, whether 
death, the cessation of vitality, is a painful 
process. 

If there were more "compulsory Greek" 
there would be a truer appreciation of the 

7 97 



98 Ubc painlessness of Deatb 

word values of the English language. The 
phrase ''death-agony" has brought much 
confusion into this matter. It suggests 
pain of an acute character, though, really, it 
means nothing of the sort. 

Death "agony" is simply the final struggle 
or conflict of the forces of life against the 
overmastering power that is about to extin- 
guish them. It is the last guttering or flick- 
ering of the candle before it goes out. 

It is probable that in most cases a dying 
person is unconscious of the final stages of 
his disease, and that the laboured breathing, 
which is so distressing for the onlooker, or 
the convulsive struggles seen in certain di- 
seases, do not betoken any suffering on the 
part of the patient. 

One has sometimes seen a healthy individ- 
ual lying on his back in a profound sleep, 
breathing with great effort, with much stertor, 
and with every appearance of distress. He 
is, apparently, being slowly asphyxiated. 
His tongue has fallen back and obstructed 



Ube TTestimons of tbe Bging 99 

the orifice of the windpipe, and respiration 
can only be conducted with great difficulty. 
But if one turn such a person on his side, and 
draw the tongue gently forward, the breath- 
ing immediately becomes easy; and if one 
wake the sleeper to ask if he were conscious 
of any distress during his slumber, he is cer- 
tain to say "No!" I have seen healthy 
sleepers apparently suffer more than the 
dying,, and know nothing whatever about it. 
In February, 19 14, an interesting corre- 
spondence took place in the columns of the 
Times as to whether the act of death is 
associated with physical pain. Much inter- 
esting evidence was offered from many 
quarters, but I shall make use of only two 
of the letters published. One was from 
Professor J. Cook Wilson, who described the 
terrible respiratory struggles of his father, 
when dying from cardiac failure supervening 
on influenza. The harrowing struggles of 
the dying man were apparently so painful 
that his son could hardly believe the assur- 



ioo Ube painlessness of 2>eatb 



ance of the medical attendants that the 
patient knew nothing of them. After several 
hours passed, apparently, in intense agony 
the patient woke up, and volunteered the 
statement that he had spent a comfortable 
night. This was unexpected but very gratify- 
ing corroboration of the physician's opinion. 
Another correspondent contributed a per- 
sonal experience. He had narrowly escaped 
death from typhoid fever in a mining camp 
in Mexico, and after his recovery he was 
informed by his friends that in his delirium 
he had shrieked and fought as though suffer- 
ing untold agonies. As a matter of fact he 
had, all the while, been entirely free from 
pain, anxiety, or fear. 

It is a painful thing to witness an epilep- 
tic convulsion, and these convulsions may 
sometimes be so violent that muscles are 
ruptured or torn from their attachments. 
Yet, the sufferer, when the fit is over, has 
absolutely no knowledge of the terrible con- 
vulsion through which he has passed, and 



■(Unconsciousness of Suffering 101 

is at a loss to explain how he has bitten his 
tongue or torn his muscle. 

I have never seen anyone in the throes 
of death present such an appearance of in- 
tense and violent suffering as I have seen 
patients manifest in the convulsions of 
eclampsia and uraemia. Eclampsia is a 
formidable complication that is sometimes 
met with at child-birth, and varies consider- 
ably in intensity. The convulsions may be 
prolonged and very severe, and the patient 
would appear to be suffering unspeakable 
torture. Sometimes the muscles of the face 
are distorted into the mask of acute agony, 
but, when the convulsion is over, the patient 
is quite unaware of what she has passed 
through. One of the worst cases of eclamptic 
convulsion I ever saw, occurred in a woman 
aged twenty-eight. I was present at the 
moment of onset, and saw agony graven in 
sharp characters upon the sufferer's face. 
But when the convulsion was over the patient 
slowly recovered consciousness and, as she 



102 XTbe painlessness of Deatb 

opened her eyes, said, "I have had a nice 
little sleep." 

Uraemic convulsions, which sometimes 
supervene on Blight's disease, are also, 
apparently, attended by acute pain; but 
the patient is perfectly unconscious of them. 
In all likelihood this holds true of the dying. 
The sensorium is blunted by disease, and by 
the accumulation of poisons in the circulat- 
ing blood, and the symptoms that are so pain- 
ful for the healthy observer to witness have 
often no meaning for the person who is mani- 
festing them. 

Some diseases that terminate fatally are 
undoubtedly attended by much pain; but 
we are not justified in transferring to death, 
which puts an end to the sufferings, the 
responsibility for the distress which may 
precede it. The sufferings are the result of 
disease ; they are in no sense a part of death. 
On the other hand there are many diseases 
which are attended by little physical pain. 
I have been assured by a patient, a few days 



jffrst*1foan& Evidence 103 

before his death, that in a long illness of 
several months' duration he had suffered no 
pain, but only a little discomfort. So we 
may reach the gate of death without passing 
through any avenue of pain upon our way. 

We can never have definite first-hand 
knowledge as to whether the final act, the 
very act of death, is painful. The dead 
man knows the secret, but an eternal silence 
lies upon his lips, and he cannot tell us. 
We can, however, get very near the point. 
Persons who have been rescued from death 
by drowning, and been restored to con- 
sciousness only after many hours of careful 
treatment, testify that at the moment of 
immersion and before consciousness began 
to fail they suffered much distress. But, 
by and by, the distress gave place to a 
feeling of drowsy comfort in which they 
remained until consciousness was com- 
pletely lost. Some of them go the length 
of saying that it is much more painful to 
be resuscitated than to drown. 



104 XTbe painlessness of Deatb 

In his Psychological Inquiries Sir Benjamin 
Brodie quotes the case of a sailor who, after 
his rescue from the sea, lay for a long time 
insensible. On recovering consciousness he 
declared that "he had been in heaven, and 
complained bitterly of his being restored to 
life as a great hardship. " 

In his Historia Vitce et Mortis, Bacon re- 
cords the following incident. A young man, 
anxious to know what the feelings of those 
who hanged themselves might be, made a 
personal experiment. After he had been 
cut down and resuscitated he was asked what 
he had suffered, and he replied that he had 
felt no pain. ("Ille interrogates quid passus 
esset, retulit se dolor em non sensisse.") 

The poet Cowper, who made at least three 
attempts to escape from the melancholy 
obsessions that from time to time rendered 
his life a misery, has put it on record that 
when he tried to commit suicide by hanging 
in his room in the Temple he experienced 
no pain. 



Hn JEasy Zbing to Die 105 

Sir Francis Younghusband, that distin- 
guished soldier who was the first to lead 
a British force to the forbidden capital of 
Thibet, was almost killed, a few years ago, 
by a motor-car which ran him down. He 
has enshrined his experiences in the delight- 
ful little book Within, which was the fruit 
of his convalescence. He says: "Then came 
the crash. I seemed to be whirling in a 
wild struggle with the machine. Was it to 
be death? It seemed it must be. And if 
death had resulted it would have been ab- 
solutely painless, for no pain had yet come. 
There would have been simply extinction, 
without suffering and without thought. I 
would just have been obliterated like a moth 
in the candle or the caterpillar beneath our 
feet, and suffered as little. In an instant 
the full current of life, with all its unfulfilled 
purposes, and ties of love and affection, would 
have been brought to a stop. But I myself 
would have felt as little as an electric lamp 
when the current is switched off. The light 



io6 ubc painlessness of 2>eatb 



would have gone out, but there would have 
been no pain." 

Tyndall, who was once rendered un- 
conscious by an electric shock, believed that 
death by lightning stroke must be painless 

We begin our lives unconsciously. Not 
one of us has any memory of that sublime 
moment in our history when we first began 
to exist, or, as Tennyson has put it : 

' . . . Star and system rolling past 
A soul shall draw from out the vast, 
And strike his being into bounds." 

We are equally unconscious of having 
suffered any pain at the moment of our birth. 
The pangs of birth are the mother's; the 
child, in all likelihood, does not suffer during 
its entry into the world, for its delicate 
organization could not survive such an ordeal. 
And so it is not unlikely that when the end 
comes, and we throw off life like a garment, 
we shall feel no pain. 

That fascinating and courtly physician, 



Hn Bass TTbing to Die 107 

Sir William Gull, who, in his long experience 
at Guy's Hospital and in private, must have 
stood by many death-beds, is said to have 
comforted a querulous old gentleman, who 
feared that death might be a painful act, 
with the words, "My dear sir, you will know 
nothing about it, it will be just as easy as 
being born. " 

In curious contrast with those who believe 
that it is a painful thing to die, we have 
the opinion of Sir James Paget, the eminent 
surgeon, who was inclined to think that if 
we were conscious of the act of death we 
might discover it to be a pleasurable sensa- 
tion. This idea finds confirmation in the 
words of William Hunter, the great anatomist 
and surgeon, who, with his dying breath, 
whispered to a friend: "If I had strength 
enough to hold a pen I would write down 
how easy and pleasant a thing it is to die. " 

Those who have seen much of death are 
agreed that it is often a difficult matter to 
determine the precise moment at which the 



108 TLbc painlessness of Deatfo 

final change occurs, so imperceptibly and 
quietly does life merge into death. There is 
no physician who has not stood, many a 
time, in a hushed room, with a finger on a 
flickering pulse and watched the end super- 
vene so gently that not till he had placed his 
stethoscope over the heart could he be sure 
that "Life's fitful fever" was over. This 
is how the great change usually supervenes 
in old people — a gradual somnolence, passing 
by gradations into a deeper and deeper 
slumber till, as the ancient Greek philoso- 
pher Diogenes of Sinope said, "One brother 
begins to embrace the other," and sleep is 
swallowed up in death. In most cases they 

"Drift on through slumber to a dream 
and through a dream to death." 

The death of a child is often as impercep- 
tible, and at any age the end may occur so 
quietly as to be almost unobserved. The 
poet Hood showed himself to be an excellent 
clinical observer when he wrote: 



Sufcfcen Beatb 109 

"We thought her dying while she slept, 
And sleeping when she died." 

These facts are opposed to the idea that 
death is a process attended by pain. They 
indicate, on the other hand, that whatever 
may have been the sufferings of the patient 
in his last illness, the moment of death is 
free from all distress. We cannot conceive 
that pain is a necessary and inseparable 
attribute of death when we remember how 
many people pass away so suddenly and 
imperceptibly that their companions fail 
to notice that they hav r e died. A husband 
and wife retire to rest at night apparently 
in perfect health. In the silent watches the 
long finger of death is laid upon one of 
them, and the end comes so quietly that the 
other sleeper is not disturbed. Some years 
ago I was called to see an old lady who had 
died in her easy-chair at the fireside. She 
had been reading a book, which her daughter, 
who was sewing in the same room, heard 
fall upon the floor. She imagined that her 



no Zbc ipainlessness of Beatb 

mother had gone to sleep, and gently lowered 
the light that her sleep might not be inter- 
rupted. But it was a sleep that nothing 
could disturb: it was the sleep of death. 

A busy city man falls in a heap, dead, after 
writing a cablegram; another apparently 
faints in the train or the tram without sign 
or symptom of distress; another opens his 
door in the morning and drops dead on the 
threshold, all without a cry. There can be 
no agony in such deaths as these, and such 
deaths are daily occurrences. Not a few 
doctors pass over in silence the petition in the 
Litany which asks for deliverance from sud- 
den death. For they believe that to die in 
the twinkling of an eye is better than to 
come to the crossing after long months of 
sickness. J 

In character, temperament, and religious 
belief John Milton and Alexander Pope 

1 1 have it on high ecclesiastical authority that this is a 
misinterpretation of the Litany. "Sudden death," I am 
informed, means death in an unprepared state. 



/■Mlton, 3obnson, pope m 

were wide as the poles asunder. But there 
was a remarkable similarity in the manner of 
their death. Milton, our great organ- voiced 
Puritan, afflicted with blindness for years 
and a martyr to gout in its most painful 
form, died, as Johnson puts it, "by: a quiet 
and silent expiration about the tenth of 
November, 1674, at his house in Bunhill- 
Fields." 

Pope had been a sufferer from physical 
defects all his days, and during the conclud- 
ing five years of his life he was a martyr to 
asthma and other distressing maladies for 
which the medical science of the day could 
offer him little, if any, relief. The month 
of May, 1744, was one of much physical 
and mental distress for him. At times he 
was delirious, and again he had delusions 
and hallucinations. But, "He died in the 
evening of the thirtieth day of May, 1744, 
so placidly that the attendants did not dis- 
cern the exact time of his expiration. " 

The gentle fashion in which death comes 



ii2 Zbc painlessness of 2>eatb 

to the aged is well illustrated by the closing 
hours of the Wesleys. From his student 
days at Oxford, where he injured his health 
by overstudy, Charles Wesley, who be- 
queathed to the literature of hymnology 
some of the sweetest lyrics that inspired pen 
ever indited, had been a confirmed hypo- 
chondriac. As Southey says, "He had 
always dreaded the act of dying, and his 
prayer was that God would grant him pa- 
tience and an easy death. A calmer frame 
of mind and an easier passage could not have 
been granted him; the powers of life were 
fairly worn out, and without any disease, 
he fell asleep." This was in his eightieth 
year. Three years later, at the age of 88, 
"in sure and certain hope of Eternal Life," 
John Wesley laid his armour down. Some 
months before he died he wrote: "I am now 
an old man, decayed from head to foot. My 
eyes are dim, my right hand shakes much; 
my mouth is hot and dry every morning; I 
have a lingering fever almost every day; my 



Beatb, a Sleep 113 

motion is weak and slow. " A little later he 
wrote : ' ' I feel no pain from head to foot ; only, 
it seems, nature is exhausted, and, humanly 
speaking, will sink more and more till 

"The weary springs of life stand still at last." 

He died on the second day of March, 1791, 
after a few days of weakness and increasing 
lethargy, passing " peacefully away about 
ten o' clock.' ' 

''His face was placid, and the expression 
which death had fixed upon his venerable 
features was that of a serene and heavenly 
smile." In describing his closing years 
Southey says, "Other persons perceived his 
growing weakness before he was thus aware 
of it himself; the most marked symptom was 
that of a frequent disposition to sleep dur- 
ing the day . . . the involuntary slumbers 
which came upon him in the latter years of 
his life were indications that the machine 
was wearing out, and would soon come to a 
stop." 



ii4 TOe lPatnle55ttes5 of Deatb 

So death came to them, and to myriads 
of others of the sons of men, not as a torturer 
bringing untold agony, but as an angel of 
sleep : 

"And so, when life's sweet Fable ends, 
The soul and body part, like friends." 

There is no "agony" in death, whatever 
may have been the nature of the sickness 
which has preceded it. Death is like the 
restful calm that falls upon the sea after 
the tumult of a wild storm. 



CHAPTER VI 
EUTHANASIA 



"5 



"Bis est mori alterius arbitrio mori." 

PUBLIUS LOCHIUS SYRUS. 

'Darkling I listen; and, for many a time 

I have been half in love with easeful death, 
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, 

To take into the air my quiet breath; 
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 

To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
In such an ecstasy!" 

John Keats. 



116 



CHAPTER VI 

EUTHANASIA 

We have already seen that in all likelihood 
the act of death is free from pain; but we 
must admit that some of the illnesses which 
terminate in death are accompanied by much 
suffering. The suffering may be very severe, 
as in cases of angina pectoris, meningitis, 
peritonitis, tetanus, or cancer affecting cer- 
tain regions of the body. In angina pectoris 
the agony is intense, but it is spasmodic and 
not continuous, and if, as all too frequently 
is the case, the spasm culminate in death, the 
act of death must come as a pleasurable 
relief. 

In meningitis the most painful stage is 

the preliminary one, when every loud sound 

or ray of light sends an arrow of fire through 
117 



n8 Eutbanasfa 



the tortured brain. But once the disease 
is established the sufferer drifts into a condi- 
tion of unconsciousness which usually per- 
sists for several days, and terminates in 
death. 

In peritonitis the pain is very acute, and 
is increased by the pressure of the lightest 
covering. But in most cases of peritonitis, 
if at all extensive, there is a rapid absorption 
of poisonous substances which rapidly brings 
about unconsciousness, and the patient no 
longer feels. 

In tetanus, or lock-jaw, we are dealing 
with an affection which is characterized by 
severe convulsions, during which the patient 
does not lose consciousness. It shares this 
evil peculiarity with hydrophobia. In prac- 
tically every other disease attended with 
convulsions, consciousness is lost during the 
fit. But it is otherwise with tetanus and 
hydrophobia, the sufferers from which are 
hideously aware of the torture they are en- 
during. We can imagine with what relief 



flDas TOe Ibasten Beatb? 119 

the "agony" of death will be hailed by such 
sufferers. 

Cancer is not necessarily a painful disease, 
but it can produce unspeakable torture if 
any sensory nerve become involved. Science 
has done much to mitigate the suffering 
inseparable from these affections, and most 
physicians must many times have endorsed 
John Hunter's fervent exclamation, "Thank 
God for opium." Opium is only one of a 
large number of pain-subduing remedies 
which are now at our disposal, and a wise 
physician knows when to make use of them. 
But they should never be abused. 

Many times I have discussed the question 
whether, in a hopeless case attended by 
much suffering, the physician would be justi- 
fied in giving a lethal dose of morphia to his 
patient. As a rule the layman argues 
strongly that this should be done. But the 
responsibility is not on his shoulders, and, if 
it were, his conclusion would not come so 
glibly from his lips. It is always an easy 



i2o Eutbanasia 



thing to solve, in the abstract, a difficulty 
with which we are never likely to be faced. 
This makes it a light matter for a philosopher 
and poet like Maeterlinck to look forward to 
a time when medical science will mercifully 
put all incurables to death. 

Expressed in its simplest terms, the 
supreme objection to this procedure is that 
we cannot give life, so we have no right to 
take it. In spite of all her miracles, Science 
has not yet succeeded in creating so elemen- 
tary a thing as a blade of living grass: she 
cannot breathe the breath of life into the 
bones of the dead. She has, therefore, no 
right to hurry and hustle a living being 
across the threshold of eternity. Litem 
scripta manet — "Thou shalt not kill." 

We must never forget that human judg- 
ment is not infallible, and many a sick person 
who has been given up by the most capable 
physicians has recovered. The following 
case is quoted on the authority of the Journal 
of the American Medical Association. Some 



Doctors, Hot Executioners 121 

years ago a clergyman's wife, who was be- 
lieved to be suffering from a hopeless malady, 
published, in various newspapers throughout 
the United States, a letter in which she urged 
upon the medical profession the advisability 
of showing her ''scientific kindness" which 
would bring her sufferings to an end and give 
her a painless death. "She received many 
replies endorsing her argument that physi- 
cians should be permitted to put her and 
other similarly unfortunate patients out 
of their misery. Apparently, however, the 
lady is to-day glad that her plea did not pre- 
vail, as she is reported to have been com- 
pletely restored to health by a surgical 
operation, and to be perfectly well. " 

If it were an accepted rule of medical 
practice that a suffering sick person, if 
deemed past human aid in the opinion 
of two or more medical men, could at his 
own request, or on the request of his relatives, 
be hustled gently but firmly through the 
gate of death, the way would be open to all 



i22 Eutbanasfa 



manner of abuse. The life of a doctor is 
already beset by more than enough anxieties, 
and if to his other burdens were added this 
final decision — if the law of the land and the 
opinion of the people, which do not always 
coincide, were agreed upon this matter, I am 
firmly convinced that the medical profession 
would decline the responsibility. Medicine 
is, and ought to be, the art of healing, not 
of dealing death, and no doctor would will- 
ingly consent to carry an executioner's 
death-warrant in his pocket. 

I have heard perfectly sane and reasonable 
people say that all sufferers from cancer 
should be mercifully put to death. To ex- 
press such an opinion is, at the lowest, to be 
guilty of gross moral cowardice. We are 
becoming so emasculate that-lhe very idea 
of pain makes us flee to extremes of action. 
In itself pain is not necessarily an evil, and, 
although hard to bear, it is often beneficent 
and may even come as an angel in disguise. 
Moreover, we must never forget that though 



Dogmatic ZTbeottets 123 



the death-roll from cancerous disease is 
enormously large, and though the most 
patient researches of brilliant investigators 
have as yet given us no clue either to the 
cause or the certain cure of the affection, not 
a few cases are cured by operation, some have 
been healed by the X-rays and by radium, 
while some few cases are said to have under- 
gone spontaneous cure. I have sometimes 
wondered whether the calmly expressed views 
of these dogmatic theorists would withstand 
the shock of a personal experience, and 
whether one of them, found to be suffering 
from cancer or an incurable form of heart- 
disease, would come and ask me to help him 
to translate his frequently expressed opinion 
into a lethal fact. One man in a thousand 
might ; but the cup of life is so sweet for most 
of us that, even though the dregs may be 
bitter and scald like liquid fire, few men 
will lay it willingly down before the last drop 
is drained. The duty of the physician is to 
assuage the more intolerable pain of his 



i24 Butbanasia 



patient by the judicious use of those anodynes 
with which science has supplied him, and to 
render what of life remains to him as comfort- 
able as possible; but he must not constitute 
himself the arbiter of another's right to live. 

When we examine closely the popular 
attitude towards this matter we find that it 
is nothing more or less than the affirmation 
of an unconfessed and probably unrecognized 
selfishness. How often one hears the friend 
of a dying person say : ' ' I wish it were all over, 
I cannot bear to see him suffer. " Now this 
expression, which every doctor has heard a 
hundred times, is not the outcome of true 
affection, but is the bastard thought of a 
weak and selfish nature. The personal 
pronoun is the chief weight in the scale. 
li I cannot bear, " therefore he whom I called 
friend may hasten with his dying. 

Civilization and luxury have made us 
such otiose creatures that we hate and 
shrink from the little inconveniences, the 
unpleasantness for ourselves, the suspense, 



Care of tbc Dgfng 125 

the anxiety, and the emotional strain which 
the last illness of a friend involves us in. 
It is not the suffering of the patient, which 
applied medical skill is probably alleviating, 
but our own intolerance of personal distress 
which makes us shrink from the death-bed 
of a friend. 

The care of the dying is one of the most 
delicate offices of the physician. Much 
may be done, in a thousand little ways, to 
make the last stages of the journey easier for 
the traveller. The arrangement of the pil- 
lows, the weight of the bed-clothes, the posi- 
tion of the body, the timely administration 
of nourishment, the gentle prevision that 
anticipates the wishes which the failing 
mind can hardly formulate, and the many 
artifices of kindness with which a good nurse 
surrounds a death-bed all help to make the 
traveller's passing easier, alike for traveller 
and friend. 

Though it is his duty to fight death every 
inch of the way, a wise physician will know 



i26 JEutbanasfa 



when to cease from administering powerful 
stimulants such as strychnine and digitalin, 
strong tonics for the nervous system and 
heart. Up to a certain point they are in- 
valuable in lengthening life, but when that 
point is reached the physician should lay 
them down. Thereafter their use does not 
prolong life; it only slows down the approach 
of death. 



CHAPTER VII 
WHAT LIFE GAINS FROM DEATH 



127 



"You never know what life means till you die. 
Even throughout life, 'tis death that makes life live, 
Gives it whatever the significance. " 

Robert Browning. 

"If life did not end, if it were a process of infinite dura- 
tion, it would be devoid of the precious things that make us 
yearn for its everlasting perpetuation." 

Cassius J. Keyser. 



128 



CHAPTER VII 

WHAT LIFE GAINS FROM DEATH 

We are so accustomed to regard death from 
such wrong angles and in such defective light 
that we often fail to see the many benefits 
it confers on life. Tradition has taught us 
to look upon death as an inevitable evil. 
True vision will show us that, without death, 
life would lose many of its subtler beauties. 

Our mortality is a provision necessary 
for the transmission of life. If there were 
no death, neither you who read these words 
nor I who write them would ever have walked 
this earth; for long before we were ushered 
into life the world would have been filled 
to overflowing with a jostling crowd of human 
beings, cursed with the gift of physical im- 
mortality, and there would have been no 
9 129 



130 TKHbat %\U Gains from Beatb 

elbow room for more. Death makes possible 
the transference of life, with all its opportu- 
nities, from one generation to another: 

"Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt." 

And death gives life dynamic. If man 
knew that his days on earth were to be end- 
less, if he were conscious that he would still 
persist, through infinite aeons of time, with 
the same body and the same faculties as he 
has to-day, a denizen of the same earth, all 
incentive to bestir himself except to seek food 
and clothing would be lost. There would be 
no desire to make his mark in the world; 
no stimulating ambition to leave the world 
a little better than he found it; no hungry 
aspiration to be remembered after he is dead 
— for death is not to lay hands upon him. 
If there were no death, life would become 
a thing stagnant, monotonous and unspeak- 
ably burdensome. 

Practically all the progress that man has 
made is due to the fact that he is mortal. 



Dow Deatb Entfcbes Xffe 131 

He has recognized that he is in this world 
only for a little while, and this knowledge 
has been a goad to stimulate him to make 
diligent use of whatever talents he is endowed 
with. The secrets of Nature have been 
wrested from her grudging fingers by men 
who, knowing they were mortal, have sought 
to comprehend the mysteries of the world 
around them in the hope that knowledge 
might enable them, if not to circumvent 
death, at least to ameliorate the asperities 
of life for themselves and others. The con- 
sciousness of his finite life has compelled man 
to overcome his natural inertia, with the re- 
sult that he ceases to live an entirely vege- 
tative existence. 

Every event of our lives is coloured and 
conditioned by our mortality. Death gives 
to each of them a new value, and we focus 
the facts of life more sharply because they 
are hedged about by death. 

All our instincts and emotions are rein- 
forced by death. If we were not mortal, the 



132 Mbat %iic Gains from Deatb 

paternal and the maternal instincts would 
not dominate our lives so strongly as they 
do. If we knew that we should never die, 
we should have no desire for children to 
perpetuate our names and carry on the suc- 
cession of the race. If we were not mortal, 
children would be regarded as a superfluous 
encumbrance: unnecessary and unwelcome 
occupiers of earth-space already sufficiently 
limited ; impudent little interlopers for whom 
the world has no need. Thus, ultimately, 
we should arrive at a world without a child, 
surely a drearier and more desolate world 
than the blackest inferno ever conjured up by 
the morbid imagination of some self-torturing 
anchorite of the middle ages. 

A world without a child would be a place in 
which there was no call for some of the finer 
and most beautiful emotions to which the hu- 
man soul can give expression. If we were 
robbed of the opportunity of lavishing our af- 
fection on little children our natures would run 
the risk of becoming warped and atrophied. 



Deatb Sanctifies %ox>c 133 

As George Eliot said, "In every parting 
there is an image of death," and it is this 
simulacrum which flavours all human fare- 
wells with a sweet sadness, while it hallows 
all reunions with a holy joy. When a mother 
parts with her first-born son, whom the ad- 
venture of life has called to the other end 
of the world, it is death that gives a special 
poignancy to their parting. They may 
never see each other on earth again. That is 
the unspoken thought, that, like a drawn 
sword, lies keen upon their hearts, and it is 
that which gives a fragrance to every letter 
that passes between them during the long 
years of their separation, and which makes 
holy ground of the old hearth-stone when 
they foregather about it again. 

And death lends a peculiar sanctity to 
human love. Is not the marriage promise, 
"till death us do part?" The bride of a 
man's youth, the faithful counsellor of his 
middle life, and the loyal companion of his 
old age is made dearer to him, and he to 



134 TOUbat %ifc (Bains from Beatb 

her, by the knowledge that some day death 
will separate them. And it is the same 
knowledge that makes a young mother 
clasp her sick child to her breast in an impo- 
tent agony of love and fear. A man may 
love his books, he may be proud of his 
collection of pictures, of old furniture, or of 
ancient brasses, but the love he bears his 
wife, his children, or his friends is something 
deeper and more sublime ; it is a love intensi- 
fied and purified by the thought that human 
life is a finite thing, which may at any mo- 
ment be touched by the finger of death. 

In the moulding of the history of mankind, 
death has played a supreme part. With- 
out death human progress would have been 
infinitely slower than it has been, and the 
onrush of civilization would have been 
stayed by ancient tyrants and their tyran- 
nies. If Nero or Caligula had been physically 
immortal the amount of human suffering 
would have been incalculably increased. 
But their power for evil was cut short by 



2>eatb a Xtbetatot 135 

the hand of death, which brings to an end 
both despot and slave. Death is a great 
liberator: it frees the individual from the 
trammels of life; but it also frees the race 
from the shackles of the past. All careful 
students of history, which, in the words of 
Gibbon, "is indeed little more than the 
register of the crimes, follies, and misfor- 
tunes of mankind, " are fully persuaded of 
the ultimate triumph of right over wrong. 
It is a lesson that the poets have never 
wearied of teaching, as witness Longfellow's 
lines : 

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet 
they grind exceeding small ; 
Though with patience He stands waiting, with 
exactness grinds *He all. " 

or Bryant's: 

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again, 
The eternal years of God are hers. " 

But the part played by death in the attain- 
ment of this result is too often lost sight 



136 WLtet Xife (Bains from Deatb 

of. It is not so much the effluxion of time, 
as the scavenging of death, which gives to 
the events of history the justice of true 
perspective. So long as the participators in 
some great accomplishment are still alive, 
it is almost impossible to estimate with 
accuracy the true value, the justice or injus- 
tice, of their deeds. They tend to preserve 
the atmosphere in which the event was con- 
summated; they cannot rid themselves of 
the spirit of partisanship; their prejudices 
or biases persist with them, and tend to 
leaven the opinion of their contemporaries. 
But one by one they make their exit from 
the stage; the limelight is extinguished 
with them; the orchestra is silent, and the 
clean air of heaven sweeps the edifice ere 
the new players and the fresh spectators 
take their places. Then, and not till then, 
does it become possible to appraise at its 
true worth the performance of the departed 
players. 

Under the directing finger of the great 



Beatb purifies JufcQment 137 

First Cause man has climbed slowly, with 
bleeding feet and torn hands, from lower 
types to the development of to-day. If 
there had been no death, it is very doubtful 
if man would yet have attained his present 
degree of evolution. Death has rapidly 
suppressed the atypical, the weaklings, and 
those not qualified for survival; the "fittest" 
have been spared the longest, and whatever 
physical, or mental, or moral quality has had 
value, has tended to persist. 

It is impossible to judge of the beauty 
and symmetry of some great building until 
the scaffolding which was a necessary accom- 
paniment of its erection has been removed. 
Death clears away the scaffolding that has 
hedged about the growth of man, and we are 
what we are to-day, because death has helped 
to fashion us. 

The psychological law of relativity teaches 
us that we know things only by their oppo- 
sites. Without death we should be likely to 
hold life as of little account. Its very finite- 



138 WLtot Xife Gains from Deatb 

ness gives life a special value, and a special 
beauty — the beauty of the evanescent. And 
many of the qualities that make us cling to 
life, are qualities that have been conferred 
upon it by death. 



CHAPTER VIII 

DOES DEATH END ALL? 
(i) IS MAN MORE THAN MATTER? 



139 



"Your mental life is destitute of all the qualities of 
material existence, and it possesses all the qualities which 
the material existence lacks. Matter and mind belong 
to different realms. They are separated by the whole 
diameter of being." 

Professor A. W. Momerie. 

"Is it only a chance concourse of atoms, organized into 
a brain . . . from which comes the confident voice: I 
love, I hope, I worship eternal beauty, I offer myself in 
obedience to a perfect law of righteousness, I gladly suffer 
that others may be saved, I resist the threatening evil that I 
see? . . . Molecules, however organized, do not naturally 
thus utter themselves; chemical reactions are not thus 
expressed." 

Samuel McChord Crothers. 



"There is not room for Death, 
Nor atom that his might could render void: 

Thou, Thou art Being and Breath, 
And what Thou art may never be destroyed." 

Emily Bronte. 



140 



CHAPTER VIII 

DOES DEATH END ALL ? (i ) IS MAN MORE THAN 
MATTER? 

Does death end all? Bound up insepa- 
rably with this question is another, viz., Is 
man more than matter? If we answer the 
latter question in the negative, we are natur- 
ally and inevitably driven to the conclusion 
that death is the end of us, and that there is 
no continuance or survival of our personality 
or any part of it once the last breath has left 
our bodies. Death then means extinction. 
This may be a consoling belief for some people, 
who find life a galling yoke, and who are 
quite content to lay down the burden of it 
and utterly cease to be. But it is not a belief 
that is compatible with a man's living his 

life at its highest and best. It lacks the 
141 



142 Does 2>eatb JErti) HU? 

dynamic force necessary for the creation 
of high ideals. 

Before we can attempt to demonstrate 
that death does not end all, we must prove 
that man is more than matter. We must 
show that mind, the psyche, soul, or ego 
is not some material essence secreted by 
the brain, as the liver secretes bile, but is a 
separate entity. 

If man is only matter, then all his thoughts, 
ambitions, ideals, hopes, and fears are nothing 
more than the outcome of some chemical, 
electrical, molecular, or other physical change 
in his brain cells. They become simply condi- 
tions of matter. 

Let us think for a moment of our dearest 
friend. He has qualities of mind and char- 
acter that attract and bind others to him. 
Are we to believe that his loyalty, his hope- 
fulness, his sunny temperament, his honesty 
of purpose, his warmness of heart, his humour, 
his rare judgment, his gifts of imagination 
and of speech, and all those beauties of dis- 



/iDore Zbm /Matter 143 

position and high qualities of mind that 
endear him to us, are nothing more than 
the outward expression of some subtle 
chemical or electrical changes in the grey 
matter of his brain? 

Are the masterpieces of Titian and Ra- 
phael, the poems of Homer, Dante, and Mil- 
ton, nothing more than effervescence in the 
brain cells transferred to canvas or to paper? 
The thing is unthinkable. We might as 
well declare that the smoke emitted from 
the funnel of a locomotive is the power 
which drives the train, or that the noise 
of a pistol shot propels the bullet, as believe 
that the physical changes in the brain cells 
are thought. 

How can we imagine that alterations in 
our brain cells can determine moral issues? 
Can we write down conscience as nothing 
more than a chemical reaction in the test- 
tube of the brain? Is lofty and consecrated 
devotion to high ideals nothing more, let 
us say, than a hyperemia of the brain, and 



144 2)oes Beatb ]£nb Bll? 

must we attribute the reasoned self-sacrifice 
of Captain Oates to nothing higher than a 
physical cause. When that "gallant English 
gentleman" walked out from the lone tent 
into the Antarctic blizzard to die for his 
friends, was his noble act no more than the 
outward manifestation of a sluggishness of his 
intra-cranial blood-stream? 

Let us face the question deliberately. 
If mind is nothing more than a function of 
the brain, the disintegration of the brain 
must necessarily mean that the mind perishes 
with that organ. On this point the material- 
ist will seize with avidity. He will show that 
pathological processes in the brain are associ- 
ated with alterations in the mind; that adhe- 
sions between the membranes of the brain and 
its surface, may produce mental and moral 
deterioration; that a tumour or other gross 
lesion in certain areas of the brain may re- 
duce a man of the highest intellectual attain- 
ments to the level of a primitive bushman; 
that the presence of certain spiral micro- 



Cbaotfc Bfssonance 145 

organisms in the grey matter may provoke 
the exalted ideas of the megalomaniac, 
or that the accumulation of fluid in the 
ventricles of the brain may convert a bright 
child into a gibbering idiot. He has a 
huge armoury of such facts, each of which, 
at a first glance, appears to be a formidable 
weapon; but his weightiest argument he 
keeps till the last, and he will assure us 
that we have absolutely no knowledge of 
mind apart from brain, and that for all 
practical purposes mind and brain are 
identical. But let us imagine that our 
materialist is a musician, and let us set 
him before a piano out of tune, with stiff 
keys and half a dozen broken wires, and, 
without telling him of the crippled con- 
dition of the instrument, let us ask him 
to play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. On 
such an instrument that exquisite harmony 
would become a discord. The player has 
all the necessary technical skill; the score 
is before his eyes, and his fingers touch 



146 Boes Deatb JBrib mil 

the right keys at the right time. But the 
instrument is damaged; a hammer falls 
where there is no wire to catch its blow and 
tremble into music, and instead of a "concord 
of sweet sounds" we have chaotic dissonance. 
The analogy is a permissible one, and when 
the disgusted materialist rises from the instru- 
ment, we may point out to him that just as he 
has been unable to extract harmony from the 
damaged piano, so the mind cannot, or at 
least does not, play the harmony of life on the 
keyboard of a diseased brain. 

The brain is the organ through which 
the mind expresses itself; it is the vehicle 
by which mind reveals itself; but we have 
no right to conclude that mind cannot and 
does not exist independently of, and apart 
from, the forty-odd ounces of nerve tissue 
that are aggregated in our skulls. Until 
a short time ago we did not know energy 
apart from matter. Matter is the vehicle 
through which energy expresses itself, or 
makes itself felt; but matter and energy 



/IDatter an& finery 147 

are not identical. In the same way the 
brain and the mind are not identical, and 
a time may come when we shall be able to 
recognize mind when it reveals itself through 
some other medium than the brain. That 
this is not an extravagant dream is proved 
when we remember that science had no 
conception of energy apart from matter till 
it was compelled to presuppose the ether 
— that immaterial fabric which conveys 
the waves of solar energy from the sun to 
the earth. Now, in the gamma rays of 
radium, it has another proof that energy 
may express itself through other vehicles 
than matter. Science has had to wait 
long and patiently for this revelation, and 
the revelation has come, not as of old on 
the fire-capped peak of Sinai, in the law- 
giving voice of God, but as the reward of 
the patient, brilliant researches of a woman 
of genius in a laboratory in Paris. 

Let us admit that we do not at present 
know mind apart from brain. Our ignor- 



148 Does 2>eatb 3£nfc Bll? 

ance does not rule such a possibility out of 
court. Endowed though we may be with 
great gifts of perception and marvellous 
capabilities of sensation, our perceptual 
capacities are very limited, and our senses 
often deceive us. In the lonely recesses 
of some remote mountain we may be im- 
pressed by the intense stillness and quietness 
that pervade the solitude, but, if our ears 
were tuned to hear, we should perceive 
that the whole earth and air are vocal with 
sounds that are lost to us because our audi- 
tory apparatus is able to capture sounds only 
of a certain pitch. In the same way, though 
vision is one of our most wonderful posses- 
sions, we are little more than blind men grop- 
ing our way with tapping-sticks along the 
pathway of life, catching but vague and uncer- 
tain glimpses of the world in which we live. 
There are things around us that we cannot 
see; there are sounds that we cannot hear; 
but our inability to perceive them does not 
wipe them out of being. So we have no right 



3Brain an& Consciousness 149 

to conclude that mind or soul cannot persist 
apart from brain because as yet we are unable 
to demonstrate their separate existence. 

The materialist will tell us that thought, 
consciousness, and all the attributes of 
mind are nothing more than products 
of the brain. But there is another point of 
view: and it is not impossible that, far 
from producing thought and consciousness, 
the brain may actually limit them, and con- 
fine them within its own narrow compass. 

Let us imagine that we are sitting in a 
closed and darkened room, with only a 
faint beam of light struggling through 
the curtain that covers the window. When 
the curtain is thrown back, the light can 
enter the room, and the amount which 
will come through the window — the inten- 
sity of the source remaining the same — will 
depend on the character of the glass that 
fills it. Clear glass will let through much 
more light than opaque glass, and a large 
window will admit more light than a couple 



150 2>oes Beatb J£nfc HIl? 

of tiny panes. So it may be with the stream 
of consciousness. The clear window of the 
brain of a normal healthy man will admit 
more consciousness than the nerve ganglia 
of one of the lower vertebrates. And just 
as the rose window of some ancient cathedral 
will break up the beams of light that penetrate 
it into shafts of gold, and ruby red, and blue, 
letting them fall in a cascade of beauty on 
the pavement between the choir-stalls, so the 
stream of consciousness flowing through the 
brain of a poet or a man of genius will produce 
a more brilliant result than when it flows 
through the cottage window of some peas- 
ant's brain. It is not given to all of us 
to live behind "rose windows." Most of 
us have to be content with more common- 
place illumination. But when we escape 
from our cathedral or our cottage, though 
we leave the windows behind we do not 
leave the light; but discover that we have 
emerged into an effulgence of illumination 
of which our little windows gave us no 



Brain an& Consciousness 151 

idea. As the windows limit our light, so 
our brains may limit our consciousness. 
The glass does not create the light, it simply 
transmits it, modifying it in accordance 
with its own qualities. It is, therefore, 
more than possible that our brain, instead of 
creating consciousness, only modifies, accord- 
ing to its own inherent quality, the rays of 
consciousness that play upon it. Light is 
not recognized as such till it impinges upon 
the retina and is transmitted by the optic 
nerve to the visual centre. So, it may be, we 
are aware of consciousness only through the 
action of some subtle influence outside our- 
selves playing upon our brain. 

We may burn our cathedral and shatter 
all its glass; we may raze our little cottage 
to the ground; but we cannot, by so doing, 
destroy the light that filled them. And so, 
though we may destroy the body and the 
brain of a man, his mind or psyche is beyond 
our reach, as elusive and as impalpable 
as the ether. 



152 Does Deatb 3£nfc Hll? 

We live in a day when the tendency is to 
believe nothing except what is capable of 
scientific proof, and there are many men 
who will not accept as a fact anything which 
they cannot "verify." The attitude of 
mind is honest, but it is unreasonable. Let 
us admit at once that we cannot demon- 
strate the existence of the mind, or soul, 
or ego, as a separate entity by scientific 
methods. The instruments of science are 
material, they cannot weigh, or analyse, 
or measure the immaterial. But the beliefs 
which cannot be established on a verifiable 
basis of fact to-day are often the truisms of 
to-morrow. The pseudo-science of the bar- 
ber's shop or the raucous orator at the street 
corner is not the science of the laboratory. 
Many eminent men of science are quite con- 
tent to believe where they cannot prove, and 
the truly great scientific investigator is usually 
a man of reverent mind. A Paine or a Strind- 
berg will deny, where a Kelvin or a Lister will 
keep silence in reverent expectancy. 



ftfme Brings proof 153 

Archimedes had never dreamed, and could 
not prove, that our globe travels round the 
sun; but the earth rolled on in its orbit 
unperturbed. If someone had whispered to 
Sir Isaac Newton some hint of the marvels 
of radio-activity, we can imagine that he 
would have hesitated to believe them, for in 
his day science had not discovered the means 
of verifying such facts. But radium and 
uranium and thorium existed before Sir Isaac 
was born, and the fact that they and their 
peculiar properties had not been discovered 
did not put them out of existence. The 
forces which carry a message across the 
Atlantic through the ether have existed from 
the beginning of time, but they were not 
recognized and harnessed for our use till 
Marconi made his wonderful discovery. 

Because, therefore, we cannot by scien- 
tific methods demonstrate the existence of 
mind apart from brain we have no scientific 
warrant to deny its possibility. Some day, 
perhaps, proof may be possible, but the time 



154 2>oes Beatb JBnb HII? 

is not yet. Only a generation ago there 
seemed to be an impassable gulf between 
physics and metaphysics. Now physics is 
becoming more metaphysical, and is hesitat- 
ing with uncertain foot on the lower steps of 

"The great world's altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God." 



CHAPTER IX 

DOES DEATH END ALL? 
(2) THE SURVIVAL OF PERSONALITY 



155 



"Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full 
of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut 
down . . . 

"If a man die, shall he live again?" 

Job, chapter xiv. 

"Non omnis moriar: multaque pars mei, 
Vitabit Libitinam." 

Horace. 

"There are no dead." 

Maeterlinck {The Blue Bird). 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 

Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die 
And Thou hast made him: Thou art just. " 

Tennyson. 



"Because I love this life, I know I shall love death as 
well. The child cries out when from the right breast the 
mother takes it away, in the very next moment to find in 
the left one its consolation. " 

Rabindranath Tagore. 



156 



CHAPTER IX 

DOES DEATH END ALL? (2) THE SURVIVAL OF 
PERSONALITY 

In the preceding chapter we have seen 
that the facts of life cannot be adequately 
explained on a materialistic basis. Man 
is something more than matter. He is 
matter knit with mind. He represents a 
symbiosis of body and soul, of living tissues 
and "personality." Will his personality 
survive the shock of the death of the body? 
I believe it will. 

We shall best arrive at a satisfactory 
answer to this question if we begin by con- 
sidering a few elementary properties of 
matter and energy. 

It is a fundamental fact of physical science 
that matter is indestructible. It may change 
157 



158 Does Deatb JEnS Hll? 

its form, but it cannot be destroyed, and, so 
far, has never been created by human agency. 
The clouds that sail majestically through the 
ether were but a few short days ago part of 
the opulent bosom of the sea. That subtle 
chemist, the Sun, playing his beams upon 
river and ocean has converted some of the 
water into vapour, which is borne aloft 
and aggregated into the cloud masses that 
sweep like white-rigged galleons across the 
sky. In their wind- driven courses they come 
into touch with the cool atmosphere of 
the hill-tops, and discharge their burden of 
vapour in the form of rain. The rain feeds 
the rivers, and the rivers feed the sea, and the 
unending cycle repeats itself as it has from 
the beginning of the world. 

A great flake of blue-grey ash falls from 
a smoker's cigar, and soon there will be 
nothing left but a heap of dust and a sodden 
stump. But the matter that constituted 
the cigar still persists. It has only changed 
its form. Some of it has been converted 



Hn Epic of tbe Dust 159 

into heat; some has floated into the atmos- 
phere as ghostly coils of smoke; some has 
gone to make the perfume and aroma that 
have soothed the smoker; some lies in the 
heap of ash. The cigar has ceased to be; 
but the matter which constituted it all per- 
sists, though it is past the wit of the wisest 
chemist to synthetize these separated parti- 
cles and reconstruct it again. 

I look out of my window and see a cloud 
of dust caught up from the tawny surface 
of the road by the April wind. It sweeps 
over the hedges and falls on the fields, which 
are already carpeted with fresh green. The 
dust consists of the waste products of animal 
life, and of an infinite number of fine particles 
worn off the surface of the road from stone, 
and rock, and beaten earth by the trafficking 
feet of wayfaring men. It falls upon the 
pastures. It is lowly dust, so lowly that 
many feet have trodden upon it, but it 
has suddenly been called to the higher 
services of nature. It lies like some grey 



1 60 2>oes H>eatb 3£trt> HIU 

filmy vesture on the grass and the young 
sprouting crops. Then comes the gentle 
benediction of the rain, and the dust enters 
upon a new life. It is carried down into 
the earth, where the seeking rootlets await 
it. It yields itself to them, gives up what- 
ever nourishment it contains, and becomes 
a part of the scarlet poppy or the golden 
corn, or the no less useful grass of the field. 
What was once dishonoured dust has been 
used for the upbuilding of food for men and 
cattle, and in due time some of it will become 
part of the human body. Our brains, the 
cunning instruments of our mind, are housed 
in by walls of bone which contain salts that 
may once have been a handful of dust blown 
from a wind-swept road. 

It is a startling but incontrovertible fact 
that all the elements which went to make up 
the garment of flesh that was the earthly 
tabernacle of Julius Caesar, and that every 
atom that, by its orderly and harmonious 
arrangement, constituted the beautiful and 



Ubc Conservation ot Energy 161 

seductive body of Cleopatra are still in exist- 
ence somewhere in the universe. Changed 
they may be, but they still persist; and 
infinitesimal particles that once were a 
part of Cleopatra may now be enshrined 
in the pure beauty of some lily of the Nile, 
or in the dusky loveliness of some daughter 
of the Egyptian desert. This is not transmi- 
gration of the soul, nor reincarnation. It 
is nothing more than a restatement of the 
fact that matter is indestructible, and that 
though it may change its character or its 
surroundings it still persists, and may be 
used again, as a builder may use an old 
brick, in the construction of a body similar 
to that of which it once formed a constituent 
part. Examples of the kind might be 
multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been 
said to illustrate the point and to show 
that matter cannot be destroyed. 

Side by side with this elementary fact 
of physical science there is another, namely, 
the conservation of energy. 



162 Does 2>eatfo En& Hli? 



When a cue strikes a billiard-ball, some of 
the force expended by the muscles of the 
driving arm is used to overcome the inertia 
of the stationary ball; some of the energy 
gives it momentum, which is given up in 
turn to overcome the friction of the surface 
of the table and the resistance of the air, 
and finally much of the energy is given up 
when the ball strikes the resilient cushion, 
or cannons against another ball to which 
it transfers a considerable portion of the 
energy it has carried from the muscles of 
the player. Now if all the heat, and move- 
ment of the atmosphere, and the amount of 
force expended by the ball in impinging on the 
cushion or in striking the other ball, could be 
collected and converted again into the same 
kind of energy, and measured by a suitable 
machine, it would be found to equal exactly the 
amount of energy which the player expended 
when he struck the ball. Energy tends to 
become dissipated and altered in character, 
but its amount in the universe is constant. 



/DMnfc, tbe /©aster of /IDatter 163 

Let us take another commonplace example. 
Thousands of years ago the sun shone on 
primeval forests in our land, and the leaves 
of the trees caught its generous rays and 
locked them up in their hearts. Ages have 
passed; the forests have disappeared and are 
hidden in the form of coal under many feet 
of earth. But men have sought out these 
buried repositories of solar energy, and when 
we warm ourselves before a blazing fire or an- 
nihilate distance in an express train, we are 
making use of the stored-up heat and light 
that left the sun myriads of years ago, and 
that has been hidden as potential energy since 
the days when the young leaves first spread 
themselves. It is a strange paradox, but 
industrial England, with all its gloom and 
smoke, is built on sunbeams. 

Matter and energy cannot be destroyed. 
Now man has not created matter, nor can 
he create energy, but he can control both. 
He can change the form of matter by making 
use of accumulated experience. He can lessen 



164 2)oes 2>eatb i£nfc> Eli? 

the dissipation of energy by transferring it 
into useful channels ; he can, by the reasoned 
use of his knowledge, lock up by chemical 
combinations an infinite amount of potential 
energy in such a substance as dynamite, or in 
our most modern explosive, trinitrotoluol, 
and he is able to convert the potential energy 
in a stream of water from an Alpine glacier 
into electrical energy which will propel a train 
to the top of a mountain. Matter and 
energy are his servants; not the servants 
of his physical body, but of his intellect or 
mind. The servants are indestructible ; shall 
the master be destroyed? Surely, Reason 
can make but one answer, which is that mind 
also is imperishable and must persist. 

Still another argument may be advanced, 
from the physical side, to support the idea 
of the survival of the soul or mind. Human 
life consists of two forms of life progressing 
simultaneously. There is the vegetative 
life of the cells out of which the body is 
built, and there is the conscious life of the 



%ifc of Wital ©taans 165 

ego. Until a few years ago it was believed 
that a part of the body removed by operation 
lost its vitality immediately or very shortly 
after its separation from the body proper. 
But we live in an era of great discoveries. 
Almost every day some trifle of flotsam or jet- 
sam is pulled out of the ocean of knowledge, 
and it has been discovered that, under suit- 
able conditions, parts of the body, and even 
whole organs taken from it, will continue to 
live for long periods after their removal 

A Russian physiologist has shown that 
the human heart will continue to contract 
with a normal rhythm, many hours after 
its removal from the body; while French 
and American surgeons have shown that 
parts of the body may be removed and kept 
alive for prolonged periods, and may, at a 
later date, be transplanted or regrafted 
into other bodies, where they will once 
again resume their normal functions. Some 
of these tissues, in suitable media, will 
actually continue to grow for a period after 



166 Boes Beatb En& Ell? 

their separation from the body. Now, if 
these things are true of the merely vegeta- 
tive life of man, surely we have reasonable 
ground for believing that the conscious 
life of the ego, a thing infinitely higher than 
the vegetative life of the cell, will continue 
after its separation from the body. It is 
straining our credulity to believe that what 
has been proved, by scientific experiment, 
to be true of the lower shall not also be true 
of the higher. 

There are some who are willing to admit 
that death does not mean annihilation, but 
who hesitate to accept the possibility of 
the mind or soul surviving as a definite 
personality. They are prepared to go so 
far as to allow that, at death, a spiritual 
something may leave the body, and merge 
at once into some great central source of soul, 
losing its identity in the infinite. This, how- 
ever, would not mean the survival of the soul 
as an ego, and I do not accept the theory. I am 
persuaded that the soul persists as personality, 



TTbe Soul persists as an Ego 167 

and does not change into some lower form of 
1 'energy," blown upon by every vagrant 
wind that frolics between the stars. It 
persists as personality with this essential 
difference, that it is freed from the trammels 
and limitations of the pl^sical body. 

It does not lose its identity, like the water 
of a bottle opened in the depths of the sea, 
or like air that escapes into the surrounding 
atmosphere from a deflated tyre. It remains 
a separate entity; it persists as an ego. 

In support of this opinion we may adduce 
the following facts. Behind all nature there 
is law. No sensible man to-day imagines 
that this earth of ours is a wandering frag- 
ment of matter tossed into infinite space. 
The mind of man has discovered that its 
movements are governed by certain laws; 
that all the regular phenomena of nature, the 
succession of day and night, the seasons, the 
tides, the movement of the planets, are all 
subject to laws. Now man has discovered 
many of these laws. He has given them con- 



168 Woes Beatb Bnfc HU? 

crete expression. He did not make them, 
though he makes deductions from them, and 
orders his life on the grounded belief that 
the law of nature in operation yesterday 
will still be in force on the morrow. He has 
deciphered them, as they were written in im- 
perishable characters on the pages of nature 
by the great First Cause. They are rational 
laws, so we take it that they are the work 
of a First Cause that is not some blind 
force, but that is rational or that has rea- 
son. And it is man's proudest boast that 
he is a rational being, that he too has 
reason. 

Now, we cannot imagine that the great 
First Cause was driven by any outside 
compulsion to create the Universe, It was 
the outcome of an act of free will; and man 
is a free agent — he, too, has free will. So 
that man, this infinitesimal speck in the 
Universe, this mere ant busying himself 
with his daily cares on his little ant-heap, 
has some of the attributes of the divine, the 



flDan anb tbe Eternal 169 

eternal and unchangeable. And these at- 
tributes must persist as they are. Reason 
cannot be degraded into some form of en- 
ergy, and Will cannot be dissipated into 
heat. They must persist as a part of our 
personality. 

We may, however, seek proof of the pro- 
bability of the survival of man's personality 
in many other directions. Since man's 
appearance upon the earth, no other ques- 
tion has had such a perennial interest for 
him; no problem has tormented him with 
such anxieties; and the solution of no other 
enigma has been sought after with such 
unconquerable hope. The universality of the 
belief that man is an immortal soul is in itself 
some proof of the assumption. The hope of 
immortality is a basic fact in most religions, 
and a dominant keynote, and an assured con- 
viction of Christianity, the loftiest of all. 

In the priceless volumes of The Golden 
Bough, Sir James Frazer has accumulated 
evidence to prove that the belief in the 



170 Does Deatb Bn& HIU 

existence of a soul, which survives separa- 
tion from the body, is shared by many 
primitive peoples. Naturally, the ideas of 
primitive peoples vary as to the nature, 
the functions, the attributes, and the fate 
of the soul, and are not to be compared with 
the sublime psychology of the Christian 
religion. We must, however, distinguish 
between the existence of a belief, and the 
particular form in which that belief may 
express itself. The important point is that 
the belief is widespread, and any belief 
that is widely distributed among scattered 
peoples, between whom there can have been 
no contact, is entitled to consideration. 

This belief or hope had its birth very 
early in the history of the human race. 
Palaeolithic man buried with his dead wea- 
pons and implements which he believed 
would be of service in the life beyond the 
tomb. It was held by the ancient Egyp- 
tians, who had elaborated an eschatology 
of their own in which Osiris judged the 



XTbe flncompleteness of %itc 171 

souls of the dead. We catch vague whis- 
perings of it in the deathless verses of the 
Greek poets; but it culminated in Hellenic 
philosophy in the person of Socrates, who 
drank his cup of hemlock with the confident 
assurance that it could only destroy his 
body, but would leave Socrates, the soul, 
untouched, free to depart "into that invisi- 
ble region which is of its own nature, the 
region of the divine, the immortal, the wise. " 
Since the days of Plato this problem of im- 
mortality has been one of the chief rallying 
grounds of the philosophers, and the argu- 
ments that have been suggested by way of 
proof are almost incalculable in number. 

Philosophy and religion alike have laid 
stress upon the incompleteness of life, and 
have based upon that a hope for the con- 
tinuance of personality after death. The 
best and fullest life falls far short of its 
ideals and aspirations. It is nothing more 
than an arc of a great circle, whose circum- 
ference can only be completed in the beyond. 



172 2>oes Deatb En£> Bin 

The loftier a man's ideals, the less oppor- 
tunity is there of seeing their attainment 
in this life. "The man with the muck- 
rake" can get out of life all that he seeks 
after; the pure soul of a Sir Galahad, with 
ideas of absolute truth and absolute goodness, 
cannot attain its goal this side of the grave. 
If there is any justice in the scheme of things, 
as we know there is, surely the high ideal will 
not be penalized. 

Then, further, a means of satisfaction has 
been provided for every longing of which the 
human being is capable. If he hunger and 
thirst, there is food and drink in abund- 
ance for the satisfaction of these primitive 
instincts. If he is weary there is 

" Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep." 

If he long for beauty, the whole panorama 
of nature unrolls itself before his wondering 
eyes, and in the glory of the setting sun, 
the grey grandeur of wave-swept rocks, the 
perfect form of the lowliest flower of the 



Soul JBebfnfc Barrefc Minnows 173 

field, or the majesty of a starlit night, his 
longing for the beautiful is satisfied. Or 
does he love and long for harmony? Let 
him listen to the twice-sung melody of the 
thrush; let him lend an ear to the aspiring 
and invisible skylark; let him hearken to 
the babbling of the tinkling brook, the 
whisper of the wind or the diapason of 
the sea. Does he glory in his strength? The 
lofty peak of the mountain challenges him 
to the ascent; and the heaving waves of 
the ocean cry to be cleft by the swimmer's 
arm. And even when many of the ordinary 
avenues of sense are closed, the longings, 
and aspirations, and desires of the soul 
behind the barred windows can still be 
satisfied. To read the marvellous stories of 
Helen Keller, who, at the age of nineteen 
months, became deaf, dumb, and blind, or of 
Marthe and Marie Heurtin of Poitou, who 
were born deaf, dumb, and blind, is to learn 
how beings apparently isolated, except by 
the sense of touch, from all the wonder 



174 2>oes Beatb EnD Ell? 

of the outside world can still be made able 
to communicate with others, and to enjoy 
and participate in the fuller life around them. 
Surely we have a right to anticipate that, 
if provision has been made for gratifying all 
the ordinary desires of the human heart, 
this lofty aspiration for continued life after 
death shall not fail of its fulfilment. Is it 
to be the only longing that is unsatisfied? 
As Adam Ferguson has said, "The desire 
for immortality is an instinct, and can 
reasonably be regarded as an indication of 
that which the Author of this desire wills 
to do." 

A nebulous immortality, in which we are 
not to be conscious of our personal identity, 
but in which we are to be degraded into some 
lower form of "energy" would not be the 
answer to the instinctive longings we feel 
stirring in our breasts. 

Life at every stage is a probation. The 
unborn infant is daily gaining strength to 
prepare it ultimately for its issue into the 



HII Xtfe a probation 175 

world. If it could think and reason during 
the long months of its pre-natal existence 
it might imagine that the life of which it 
has experience is the only life it will ever 
enjoy, and that the cataclysm of birth will 
mean for it annihilation. In the fullness of 
time it emerges into a world more wonder- 
ful and more beautiful than anything it ever 
dreamed of, an experience for which the 
previous months of its existence have been 
nothing more than a preparation. The 
sheltered years of infancy and childhood are 
a preparation for the joyous adventure of 
youth. The solstice of youth is a prepara- 
tion for the fruition of manhood and woman- 
hood ; and the opulent days of manhood are a 
preparation for the reflective calm of old age. 
All through life, from its earliest dawn, each 
successive stage is a preparation and period 
of probation for the stage that is immediately 
to succeed it. No period of life is its own 
fulfilment, each stage is preparatory to the 
next. It is, therefore, altogether unlikely 



176 Does Deatb Enfc Hll ? 

that this rule of life will break down at the 
end, and that the strenuous days a man 
has lived, the knowledge he has won, the 
character he has hammered out for himself 
on the anvil of experience, the personality 
he has built up, will go for nothing, and that 
the purpose of life is fulfilled by the year 
or two of tremulous senescence in which 
it often culminates. To believe this is to 
stultify ourselves. All life is a probation, 
and, beyond the barrier of death, I am con- 
fident that there awaits us a world as won- 
derful and as little dreamed of as that which 
awaits the unborn child beyond the gate of 
birth. 

* ' There is no death ! What seems so is transition : 
This life of mortal breath 
Is but a suburb of the life Elysian 
Whose portal we call Death.' ' 

I think there is much to be said for the 
argument in favour of the survival of per- 
sonality based by the theologians on the 



Conscience 177 



existence of conscience. The promptings of 
conscience are something more than mere 
lip-service to the conventionally recognized 
standard of conduct. It is not a product of 
education, though a wise education, properly- 
perfused and interpenetrated by religious 
teaching, will impart an added sensibility 
to the conscience. Without conscience, so- 
ciety would degenerate into anarchy. Laws 
alone will not restrain the wild passions of 
man, and when out of reach of the law 
he would, but for conscience, tend rapidly 
to degenerate to the level of the brutes. 
Conscience controls the ruler as well as the 
ruled. It is "the still small voice" in the 
heart of man, and it operates by reminding 
us that we are in some measure answerable 
for all our deeds, if not to the tribunal of 
public opinion, to the higher assize in the life 
hereafter. And it is this knowledge, derived 
from the whisperings of conscience, and 
held firmly by many simple folks who could 
not give any very valid reason for their 



178 2>oes Deatb JErib Hil? 

belief in a future life, that has saved the 
world from being given over to the unbridled 
passions of mankind. 

When all is said, we have to admit that 
the arguments for the survival of personality 
are infinitely more weighty than any that 
can be adduced against it. The opponents 
of immortality have nothing but negative 
evidence to support their position, and in 
science the negative argument is valueless. 
It may be hard, and probably many people 
find it very hard to believe that their per- 
sonality will continue after death; but it 
is harder still for them to imagine their own 
extinction. There is something within us 
which rebels against the thought, and that 
something is the soul's consciousness of its 
own immortal destiny. 

It has been suggested that personality 
cannot persist because memory is one of the 
first faculties of the mind to fail; and with- 
out memory, it is urged, personality cannot 
be continuous. But those who advance 



Subconscious flDemorg 179 



this argument forget that there is a sub- 
conscious memory, in which would seem to 
be buried all the incidents and experiences 
of the past. This subconscious memory 
may be stirred into activity in conditions 
of artificially produced hypnosis, and some- 
times gives startling manifestations of its 
existence in the senile and the dying, who 
suddenly recall, with perfect accuracy, events 
that have happened in the days of their 
earliest childhood. Goethe has put on record 
a remarkable instance of this, in the case of 
an old peasant who, on his death-bed, sud- 
denly declaimed several passages in the most 
classical Greek. It was generally believed 
that the old man did not know a single word 
of Greek, but on a careful investigation being 
made, it was discovered that when a boy he 
had been compelled to commit to memory 
and to repeat certain Greek passages to stimu- 
late to emulation an aristocratic dunce. In 
this way he had acquired a mechanical know- 
ledge of Greek phraseology. He never knew 



180 Does 2>eatb Bn& Ell? 

the meaning of the words ; but they remained, 
accurately deposited in his subconscious 
memory, until their unexpected repetition, 
many years afterwards, surprised the watch- 
ers by his bed. The subconscious memory 
seems to be immune against the ravages of 
time; and it is probable that it will serve to 
supply the personality with all the memories 
necessary for its continuance as a separate 
identity. 

No valid argument against the survival 
of personality can be deduced from the fact 
that the dead are silent, and do not com- 
municate with those they have left behind. 
When, as frequently happens, we are "cut 
off" from a friend with whom we are talking 
on the telephone, the abrupt ending of the 
conversation does not mean that one or 
other of us has ceased to be. It simply 
indicates that, for the time being, the means 
of communication between us has been 
interrupted. 

I do not venture to base any conclusion 



IPs^cbical iResearcb 181 

as to the survival of personality upon the 
so-called results of psychical research. There 
are earnest men, and men of scientific emi- 
nence, who claim to have been in personal 
communication with the spirits of the de- 
parted, and to have received messages 
from them. But any evidence which I have 
examined has left me unconvinced. At most 
these so-called messages amount to little 
more than vague and incoherent babblings, 
or to crazy scribblings on a slate. 

It is reasonable to suppose that if the 
spirit of a Gladstone or a Myers or a Stead 
could communicate with those who have 
sought to reach them from this side of the 
" great gulf fixed," the message given would 
be something worthy of the men — some 
trumpet-tongued revelation for the times, 
some brave word of encouragement for 
those who are still entangled in the meshes 
of life. But, instead, any communication 
has been little more than the unconnected 
rambling of some idiot boy. Some day, 



182 Boes Beatb Bnb HII? 

perhaps, those who love to grope with blind 
fingers along the edge of this gulf of separa- 
tion may stumble upon some great discovery, 
and may get into touch with those who have 
passed onward. But the time is not yet. 

It is altogether outside my province to 
discuss the fate of the soul after its survival 
of the shock of death. On this matter the 
battle is still raging in the camp of the 
theologians, and where the doctors of divinity 
are still at variance it would be supreme 
effrontery for a mere doctor of medicine to 
obtrude his views. But my reticence to 
touch on this point is not the outcome of any 
invertebrate belief. Science has nothing to 
do with eschatology. My thesis has been 
to show that there is nothing inherently 
impossible in the survival of personality. 
Absolute proof is as yet beyond our reach, but 
I am persuaded that even without the inspir- 
ing assurances of revealed religion, which 
in this matter must be the ultima ratio of 
all thinking men, we have good grounds to 



%ifc an& Deatb 183 

comfort ourselves with hope. As Emerson 
says, "I am a better believer, and all serious 
souls are better believers in immortality than 
we can give grounds for. The real evidence 
is too subtle, or is higher than we can write 
down in propositions. We cannot prove our 
faith by syllogisms. " 

In what is, perhaps, the most perfect 
Petrarchan sonnet in our language, Blanco 
White has given permanent expression to 
this stupendous problem of Life and Death 
which has always vexed mankind. He im- 
agines our first parent seized by a paroxysm 
of awe when he learns that day will wane, 
and be succeeded by the mystery of night. 
Black night, dark and inscrutable! What 
will become of his beautiful Eden swathed 
in impenetrable gloom? But Night comes, 
bringing with her no hideous mystery, but 
a miracle of revelation. So death itself may 
wake us from the sleep of life to a know- 
ledge vaster, grander, and more sublime 
than anything we have ever dreamed of. 



1 84 Does Deatb J£nb BU? 



"Mysterious Night, when our first parent 

knew 
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, 
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, 
This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 
Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus with the hosts of Heaven came, 
And lo ! Creation widened in man's view. 

"Who could have thought such darkness lay 
concealed 
Within thy beams, Sun! or who could 
find, 
Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood re- 
vealed, 
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st 
us blind! 
Why do we then shun Death with anxious 

strife ? 
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?" 



CHAPTER X 
EPILOGUE 



185 



"Morte carent animas: semperque priore relicta 
Sede, novis habitant domibus vivuntque receptae." 

Ovid. 



'Measure thy life by loss instead of gain; 
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth; 
For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice; 
And whoso suffers most hath most to give." 

Harriet E. H. King. 



'Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: 
The dead are not dead, but alive." 

Tennyson. 



186 



CHAPTER X 

EPILOGUE 

We have already learned some lessons from 
the world- war that still rages: lessons in 
strategy, in military tactics, in economics, 
in national organization, in finance. But 
there are other lessons we are learning, for 
in our history is being repeated the experi- 
ence of the ancient taskmasters of Israel, 
when "there was a great cry in Egypt; 
for there was not a house where there was 
not one dead." So it has come to pass 
that men's thoughts are daily turned to 
the contemplation of death, which has 
ceased to be regarded as a thing remote and 
improbable, and has become a recognized 
incident in our daily lives. And the recog- 
nition of the fact of death has directed our 
187 



1 88 Epilogue 



thoughts afresh to the problem of immor- 
tality, and it is no exaggeration to say that 
many thousands of people, who two years 
ago had but the most ill-defined ideas as 
to the survival of personality, are to-day 
firmly convinced that life is continued be- 
yond the barrier of death. 

Faith has led boldly, where Reason felt 
constrained to grope, and sometimes the 
human heart is a surer guide than the human 
head. Heart and mind alike refuse to 
believe that the brave little midshipmen, 
in the first flower of their youth, whose 
bodies now lie fathoms deep in the waters 
of the Southern Pacific or the North Sea, 
have passed into nothingness. They had 
so much to give; they gave it gladly; they 
gave it all. For such altruism is there 
no reward? Are these brave boys, and the 
many thousands more whose life-blood has 
poured into the soil of Flanders, or on the 
sands of the ^Egean Sea, to be penalized 
for their bravery in defence of the right, 



%ox>c'b {Testimony 189 



while the self-indulgent gourmand, who 
hides behind his fatty heart — the result 
of his own vices — which protects him from 
being called upon for service, extracts out 
of life every ounce of enjoyment it can offer? 
It is quite impossible to believe that such 
obvious unfairness can satisfy the demands 
of ordinary justice. But, unless there is a 
life beyond the grave, there is no assize 
which can readjust the inequality. 

Love demands the immortality of those 
whom she has lost; and Love knows that 
she does not ask in vain. A mother who 
has lost her only son, or the young wife 
whose "bridal garland falls upon the bier," 
may have had vague and shadowy ideas 
as to immortality before the thunder-cloud 
of calamity burst over them. But to many, 
suffering has brought revelation; and the 
veil that separates them from the Beyond 
has ceased to be an impenetrable curtain 
of black darkness, and has become as trans- 
parent as a drop of dew. 



190 Epilogue 



What they once hoped for weakly, they 
now know and believe with the full strength 
of their love; for they have heard, as once 
on a time another company of mourners 
heard, the voice of Him who overcame 
Death saying: 

ouk dx!0avev, dXXa /caOsuBst. 
He is not dead, but sleepeth. 



INDEX 



Adam, Dr., last words of, 74 

Adanson's Baobab tree, 12 

Addison, on death of Sir Thomas More, 68 

Animals and death, 27 

Argyll, Marquis of, execution of, 56 

Auto-intoxication and sleep, 19 

Average length of life, 13 

B 

Bacillus Bulgaricus, 15 
Battle, bravery in, 42 

excitement of, and death, 34 

painlessness of wounds in heat of, 45 

sensations in, 36 et seq. 

Behring and Roux, diphtheritic antitoxin, 52 
Benson, A. C, quoted, 64 

on John Sterling's testimony, 73 

a personal escape from death, 81 

Bernard, Claude, 16 

Boleyn, Anne, execution of, 68 

Boswell on death, 66 

Brain, and mind, the connection of, 143 

the, an organ of mind, 146 

the, as a railway terminus, 44 

Bravery in battle, 42, 43 

Brodie, Sir Benjamin, on fear of death, 83 

Bronte, Charlotte, death of, 93 

Emily, lines on death, 140 

Browne, Sir Thomas, on sleep, 29 
Browning, Robert, quoted, 128 
Bryant, William Cullen, on death, 64; quoted, 135 
191 



192 1Tn&ex 



Cassar and Cleopatra: their atoms still in existence, 160-161 

Child, a world without a, 132 

Coal, and conservation of energy, 163 

Collier, and explosion of shells, 41 

Colton, thought on death, 96 

Conscience, argument for immortality from, 177 

Consciousness and light, analogy between, 149-150 

Consumptives' hope, 76 

Cowper on suicide, 104 

Cranmer, martyrdom of, 59-60 

Cromwell, Oliver, last words of, 72 

Crothers, S. McChord, quoted, 140 



Damien, Father, 56 
Darwin, Charles, last words of, 72 
Dead, communications with the, 181 
Death, a sleep and a forgetting, 86 

and faith, 55 

and life, Weismann on, 1 1 

and love, 133 

and physical pain, 99 

and science, 10 

and sleep, 28, 108-110 

and the call of duty, 48 

and the sleep of life, 183 

animals and, 27 

definition of, 20 

dignity of, 21 

drowning and the fear of, 80 

faith overcoming fear of, 57 

fear of, 27, 31, 36 

fear of, and normal man, 65 

fear of, Dr. Johnson's, 66 

fear of, doctors and, 51 

fear of, nurses and, 51 

from capital punishment, 86 

from drowning, 103 

from old age, 18 

gloom of, 33 



1Tn&ex 193 



Death — Continued 

inevitability of, 3-5, 20 

instincts and emotions strengthened by, 131 

loneliness of, 21 

molecular, 16-17 

no agony in, 114 

no terror for the dying, 64 

our daily contemplation of, 187 

pain no part of, 102, 103 

personality, survival of, after, 157 

progress due to, 130 

Sir Walter Raleigh on, 8, 70 

soldiers and, 35 

sudden, no 

the agony of, 117 

the liberator, 135 

the maternal instinct and fear of, 60 

the moment of, 107 

the philosophers and, 9 

the scavenger, 136 

what life gains from, 129 

Die, reluctance to, 89-91 

Dignity of death, 21 

Diogenes the Epicurean, quoted, 96 

Disharmonies of life, 27 

Disraeli, Isaac, on death of Raleigh, 70 

Doctors, duty of, in fatal diseases, 123 

and euthanasia, 119 

and fear of death, 44 

experience of, with death, 74 

Donne, quoted, 28, 29 
Drowning, and fear of death, 80 

deaths from, 103 

Dust, an epic of the, 159 

Duty, the call of, and fear of death, 48 

Dying, care of the, 125 

death no terror to the, 64 



Ego of man, the, 142 

Egyptians and souls of the dead, 170 

Eliot, George, quoted, 133 

13 



i94 flnbex 



Elixir of life, 15 

Emerson, belief of, in immortality, 183 
Energy, conservation of, 161 
Epilepsy and pain, 100 
Euthanasia, 117 

F 

Faith and death, 56, 188 
Fear of death, 27, 31, 36 

not an instinct, 34 

not inborn, 29 

Ferguson, Adam, quoted, 174 

Finot and the fear of death, 31 

Frazer, Sir James, The Golden Bough, 169 



Goodhart, Sir J. F.,"on the fear of death, 85 
Gull, Sir William, on death, 107 
Guthrie, James, on fear of death, 58 

H 

Hazlitt," William, quoted, 26 

Hegesias, 30 -^ 

Holmes, Thomas, on conduct of murderers, 88 

Hood, Thomas, quoted, 108, 109 

Horace, quoted, 156 

Hunter, Dr. William, last words of, 96, 107 

Hypnotism, and the subconscious memory, 1 79 



Immortality, the desire for, an instinct, 173 
the universal hope of, 169 



Jackson, Dr. A. F., death of, from plague, 54 

Job, quoted, 156 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, and his fear of death, 66 



fn&ex 195 



K 



Keats, John, quoted, 1 16 
Keyser, Cassius J., quoted, 128 
King, Harriet E. H., quoted, 186 
Kingsley, Charles, in death, 22 



Latimer, martyrdom of, 59 
Length of life, average, 13 

useful, 14 

Life, a probation, 174-176 

gains from death, what, 129 

prolongation of, 15 

the disharmonies of, 27 

vegetative and conscious, 164 

Light and consciousness, analogy between, 149-150 

Lightning, death from, 106 

Livingstone, Dr., and the lion, 81 

Loneliness of death, 21 

Longfellow, quoted, 135 

Love and death, 133, 189 

M 

Mackail, Hugh, martyrdom of, 58 

Macnaghten, Sir M. L., anecdote by, 87 

Maeterlinck, 120; quoted, 156 

Man more than matter, 141 

Mankind, influence of death on history of, 134 

Mary II., Queen, last words of, 72 

Maternal instinct and fear of death, 60 

Matter and energy servants of mind, 164 

Metchnikoff, Professor Elie, and problem of prolonging 

life, 15; death, 16 
Memory, the subconscious, 179 
Milton's death, in 

Mind and brain, the connection of, 143 
Molecular death, 17 
Moment of death, the, 107 
Momerie, Professor, on mental life, 140 



196 1Tn&ex 



Montaigne quoted, 2, 26, 85 
More, Sir Thomas, execution of, 68 
Muller, Dr. Hermann, death of, 53 
Muller, Max, on Kingsley in death, 22 

O 

Oates, Captain, self-sacrifice of, 144 
Old age, death from, 19 
Osier, Sir William, on fear of death, 86 
Ovid, quoted, 186 



Paget, Sir James, on death, 107 
Pain, no part of death, 102, 103 
Parr, Thomas, age of, 13 
Personality, after death, 157 

reason and will part of, 169 

survival of, 141 et seq. 

soul persists as definite, 166 

Physical pain and death, 99 

Plato and immortality, 171 

Pope, Alexander, death of, in 

Protozoa, immortality of the, 1 1 

Psychical research, and communications with the dead, 181 

Publius Lochius Syrus, quoted, 116 



Raleigh, Sir Walter, quoted, 8 
Rhodes, Cecil, last words of, 74 
Ridley, martyrdom of, 59 
Robertson of Brighton, quoted, 21 
Rousseau and death, 28 



Science and death, 10 
Scott, Captain, death of, 73 

last words of, 91 

Seneca quoted, 2, 26 
Shakespeare quoted, 26, 30 



1Tn&ei 197 



Sleep and death, 19, 28, 108-110 

Smith, Alexander, on majesty of death, 22 

Socrates and the soul, 171 

Soldiers and death, 36 

Southey, on John Wesley, 113 

St. Mungo, age of, 13 

Sudden death, no 

Suicide, 29 



Tagore, Rabindranath, quoted, 156 
Tennyson quoted, 106, 156, 186 
Thought and consciousness, 149 
Tolstoy and death, 28 
Tyndall, 106 

W 

Weismann on life and death, 1 1 

Wesley, Charles, death of, 112 

Wesley, John, death of, 1 12, 1 13 

White, Blanco, sonnet on Life and Death, 183-184 

Whyte-Melville, quoted, 2 

Wounds, painlessness of in heat of battle, 45 



Yeast fungus, 17 

Younghusband, Sir Francis, experience of, 105 



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